Not my point at all. If AOSP worked like, say, the kernel (or KDE, or gcc, or any other big project) this "fix" would have been submitted to and vetted by a functioning group of experts who would have immediately said "Dude, no." and it would have died silently.
No such thing exists with AOSP. Google does their development internally. External patch submissions (if acknowledged at all) end up appearing in a usable release only months after the fact.
So the poor excited hacker here (who, let's be clear, really didn't do anything wrong other than, well, being wrong) had nowhere to post a fix somewhere where it would be useful to people. So s/he threw it up on XDA with all the other junk, and we're now having this discussion.
Do "real" open source projects issue releases after every patch?
I've recently submitted a small patch to Android and it showed up in the repository immediately. While there is some development done in secret, not everything is. You can git blame and email the developers and they will probably talk to you.
(My experience is perhaps different because I have a @google.com email address, but the developers are actually nice people that do value open source, as far as I can tell.)
> this "fix" would have been submitted to and vetted by a functioning group of experts who would have immediately said "Dude, no." and it would have died silently.
Maybe. Or maybe it would have been like all those "Turn off your Windows paging file" for XP and Vista websites.
Or all those "RAM Booster" softwares.
Users get sucked into a bunch of hokum, and having a clueful person tell them it's nonsense often does nothing to stop the nonsense.
Except there is merit to running without swap in some circumstances, and I wouldn't be surprised if projects like compcache bear some resemblance to some "compress your RAM" product out there.
I accept that on HN most people know what swap is, and when it's okay (or beneficial) to turn it off, and how to do it, and who would notice the difference, and how big to set it if you do have it.
But most people hearing this "Windows performance enhancing tweak" are not that knowledgable about their OS.
Maybe I'm more forgiving of the cargo cult tweakers than I should be, because that was one of the steps on the path to where I am now. Maybe my total understanding of virtual memory and other concepts would be more theoretically pure if I'd just ignored computers until learning the theory in school, but I think that, maybe, my hard-won experience makes me a more "empathetic" developer.
I've also had real issues with windows using far too much ram for disk cache and swapping out in-use program data; a 'ram-cleaner' will at least help in this situation.
My eventual duct tape was running cacheset once a minute to cut cache down to .5GB. Thankfully once I upgraded to windows 7 it stopped being a problem.
No such thing exists with AOSP. Google does their development internally. External patch submissions (if acknowledged at all) end up appearing in a usable release only months after the fact.
So the poor excited hacker here (who, let's be clear, really didn't do anything wrong other than, well, being wrong) had nowhere to post a fix somewhere where it would be useful to people. So s/he threw it up on XDA with all the other junk, and we're now having this discussion.