Episode: 2459
Title: HPR2459: free software's long tail
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2459/hpr2459.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 03:29:36

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This is HBR episode 2459 titled Free Software Long Tale.
It is hosted by first-time host Joey Hess and in about 7 minutes long, and Karina Cleenflag.
The summary is, response to HBR 2443 colon, BD Menu, BD Menu Mortar.
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Hi, I'm Joey Hess and this is a response to HBR 2443 by Dave Morris, where he talks
about BD Menu.
I wrote BD Menu back in 1996 and then I think I re-wrote it in C in 1997 and I just was looking
for a podcast just now and came across it on my feed and that was a nice surprise.
Don't often hear from a lot of BD Menu users, but over the past couple of decades, every
now and then somebody will say, hey, I use BD Menu and I'll be like, wow, I wrote that thing
all that time ago, it was kind of my first C program and here's somebody all these years
later still finding a use for it, isn't that great?
It's kind of the long tail applied to free software.
It seems to me to be one of the best benefits of free software that you can be, you know,
in your own little world doing your thing and then it will touch somebody all these years
later in some way and help them out.
So I wanted to say thanks to the podcast and just rambled just for a minute or two about
what it was like back then when I wrote it.
I think I was using Linux of course back then in 1996 and I had a couple of wise dumb
terminals that connected over a serial port and so I would, you know, run things on there
just to have an extra screener too and I think I wrote PD Menu to have an easy way to
let me and a few of my family members log into those wise terminals and not have to type
a lot of stuff or the command line and just pick something off the menu which kind of might
explain Dave was like, wow, there's some old programs on here, there's Pine and it has
a telnet and finger and all these, you know, it has a use net reader just as in the sample
menu is programs to run and it is kind of a snapshot of what I was using back then which
I think is kind of neat.
Of course I could update it to have something more modern but, you know, what's the point?
This is an old piece of software and it's not trying to hide that but it's still a useful
piece of software I guess.
Let's say I should mention that I've still gotten patches for PD Menu and I haven't actually
done any development myself on PD Menu for many years but every now and then somebody
will send in a patch and I'll apply it if it looks decent and that's good.
You know, it keeps it alive.
Yeah, I haven't updated it since 2014 or whatever but if somebody sends in a patch I might
just do that.
You know, nowadays I don't write C code, at least not if I can avoid it.
If I were going to actually work on something like PD Menu now I'd probably, well first
I'd fix the atrocious config file format because it's like this weird, comable limited
thing or colon-delimited or I forget what, but it's a mess.
It's ugly.
It was I think the first config file I probably wrote so I didn't know what I was doing and
I'd probably rewrite it in Haskell and write it in like a tenth of the amount of code
and make it much more sensible and bloody blob it.
The fact of the matter is you don't go back and rewrite your old project from two decades
ago just because you feel like it, it's more fun to work on something new so I probably
never will and I'll probably will hopefully never look at some of that C code which I'm sure
is pretty atrocious but apparently hasn't had any major security holes or anything.
Oh, one other thing I wanted to mention is that PD Menu has kind of had an odd influence
on the Debian project over the years.
I was a Debian developer for many years and I uploaded PD Menu into Debian which probably
helps people like Dave come across it because it's still part of the distribution and they
can easily install it which I would, first of all, if you write software that's free
software get it into the major distributions.
They are the free software community's app stores as they were.
They're the way that people will discover your software.
If it's available in a distribution it's much easier to get it installed and you're
just kind of leapfrogging up the adoption ladder by doing that even if it's something
minor like PD Menu then how many people would run the use by getting it into a distribution
you've made it much more useful in a way.
But anyway since it was in Debian and it had this extendable menu things that could make
menus by running commands Debian had this menu file that was shipped with the package
that let the package say okay this contains this program we'll give it this name, simple
stuff.
Back then there wasn't really a standard for it so Debian came up with their own and
one day I made PD Menu support it so when you run PD Menu you want a Debian system
by default you get all the things that have menu items that are installed which is kind
of handy.
The weird thing about that is that as Debian kept using the menu system and desktop files
got developed by GNOME and by the free desktop project.
PD Menu became one of the use cases for the Debian menu system like if we get rid of
the Debian menu system we won't be able to have PD Menu show menus but nobody of course
uses PD Menu and yet people in Debian projects somehow know it exists and care about it which
first of all good on y'all but secondly if I've kind of kept PD Menu has kept Debian
from moving over to desktop files in some way or retarded that progress maybe that's
a downside to it existing right but anyhow who knows it's impossible to tell with these
things we know we go off we write our little things we release them to the world and they
get used and they influence the world in ways that we will never guess and the important
thing I think is to be mindful about what you're doing but you know try to produce something
that's going to be useful to other people I could have written a quick shell script that
used dialogue or a quick pro script that used dialogue and I think that's actually where
the P and the D and PD Menu come from it was a pro script that used dialogue at first
and it became a C program using slang but I could just stop to the pro script and used it
myself and never distributed to anyone and it would have solved my problem I could have
used to know my dumb terminals and I would have long ago forgotten about it and nobody
would have used it and the world would have been just that little tiny bit worse off not
much but enough that it's worth doing it and it's totally worth it when one day you sit
down to look for a podcast and you see somebody using something you've pretty much forgotten
you wrote so thanks Dave thanks Hacker Public Radio thanks for the free software community
for making it possible for people to do this thing you know I called it PD Menu and it's
almost like public domain menu but it is if you feel licensed and the new public license
you know kind of pointed me in the right direction there and so I'm very pleased that it's still
being used all these years later that's all bye
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