Talk:cruft

Earliest Usenet uses via Google Groups:

• crufty: fa.apollo - Jun 16 1981, 5:12 pm by SHR...

  It is apparently full Unix and runs quite well on top of the rather crufty Os1100 exec in the same style that Eunice runs on VAX.

• cruftiest: fa.works - Aug 14 1981, 11:36 PDT by Kosower at PARC-MAXC

  These are not idle thoughts: an IBM 370/168 has tremendous raw speed, but some of the cruftiest software ever written makes it seem slower than the US Postal Service.

• cruft: fa.unix-wizards - Nov 11 1981, 1:45 am by ucbvax

  I don't have the data-chaining stuff in yet, but it will be enventually (don't know about reading/writing records larger than physical memory, however; VMS stuff uses page map/unmap cruft).

• cruftiness: fa.human-nets - 17 June 1982 02:41-EDT by Robert Elton Maas

  Perhaps the public-access el-cheapo bulletin board systems (CBBS et al) are good for society in an unexpected way, despite their cruftiness by our standards, they DO encourage youngsters to read.

• hand cruft (Jargon File/Hacker's Dictionary): net.jokes - Oct 4 1983, 12:49 am by Bill Mitchell

  Also CRUFT, v. [from hand cruft, pun on hand craft]

• CRUFTSMANSHIP (Jargon File/Hacker's Dictionary): net.flame - Mar 19 1985, 2:34 pm by p.a.dunkin

  CRUFTSMANSHIP noun. The antithesis of craftsmanship.

• hand-crufted: news.admin - Nov 22 1988, 6:24 pm by Matt Costello

  At that time UC Berkeley was listing ~650(?) machines, and domain routers consisted of hand-crufted sendmail rules to route all host names beginning with "ucb" to ucbvax, etc.

• hand-cruft: comp.mail.misc - Aug 2 1989, 12:52 am by Chris Lewis

  Or, even hand-cruft a mod to Rnmail that does path lookups and replaces the "To:" line (it's a pretty minor mod).

• cruftier: comp.sys.apple2 - Mar 18 1991, 7:36 pm by Doug Gwyn

  The problem with comparing desktop-oriented systems such as the IIGS or Mac against IBM PC/AT clones is that the latter often have been used in the generally cruftier text-screen mode, which is inherently faster.

• hand crufting: comp.sys.next.software - Feb 26 1994, 12:16 pm by brunkho...

  I looked at the PPD code differences between the IIIsiX duplex and the HP4 and thought better of hand crufting a 'patch' before I asked the net if one exists.

• hand crufted: gnu.ghostscript.bug - Mar 15 1994, 9:09 am by Jeremy Smith

  %%Creator: hand crufted postscript (c) jer...@kira.csos.orst.edu 1994

• hand-crufting: gnu.emacs.bug - Sep 13 1995, 5:26 pm by Brian Keith Oxley

  That works much better than the hand-crufting I did--thanks!

• handcrufted: muc.lists.netbsd.source-changes - Nov 21 1996, 7:00 pm by sou...

  - use vis(3) in vputc() instead of handcrufted function (from OpenBSD).

• cruftsmanship: comp.sys.next.advocacy - Apr 3 1997, 2:27 pm by Mike Paquette

  X. Old-world software cruftsmanship at its finest.

• handcrufting: alt.sysadmin.recovery - Sep 24 1997, 12:28 am by Don Stokes

  I _love_ handcrufting cancels so as to insert that damn chook.

• cruftsman: rec.woodworking - Feb 11 1998, 2:05 am by Bob D.

  ... you have a right to use only cruftsman power tools ...

— Hippietrail 02:50, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

RFV discussion: April 2011–January 2012

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cruft

Rfv-sense: content that is of importance only to a small population of enthusiastic fans of the subject in question.

Not seeing it at a glance at bgc, and google books:"math|maths|chemistry|space cruft" and the same search on Usenet get no relevant hits.​—msh210℠ (talk) 19:50, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

Try google books:wiki cruft. [1], [2], and [3] have some sense of cruft that's not 1 or 2, and that seem to be targetted by this definition.--Prosfilaes 20:07, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

Those three seem to have it meaning "useless content". If that's what's meant here, this sense needs to be drastically reworded; OTOH, perhaps it's really part of one of the other senses (in which case it needs to be reworded). I didn't (yet) look further at the bgc results, though.​—msh210℠ (talk) 20:16, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

It could be the second one, but I would argue the second one inappropriately packs a very specific code definition in with clutter. It seems to me to be a very Wikimedia sense, which is why we don't find many cites. I think there needs to be a third definition, but this one seems unsupportable.--Prosfilaes 18:51, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

RFV-failed. - -sche (discuss) 04:17, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

That's fancruft. I can imagine people in fandom circles might just say cruft. Equinox ◑ 22:20, 4 February 2020 (UTC)