What they achieve is very useful. How they do it is terrible.
I use them too, but their "user interface" is half-assed and full of traps. I have to have a bunch of extra scripts to check and fix them, and a ton of warnings in the README for poor souls who haven't experienced the pain yet.
Yes, I think as a way of vendoring external dependencies they are ok. That's about the only use case that makes sense to me. The friction they cause isn't worth it otherwise.
Is there any duty of care for the vending machine software vendor towards the owners of the vending machines? Are they not playing the role of a virtual clerk that allows shoplifters to walk out of the store unchallenged whenever they yell out "It's okay; I've already paid for this!"?
It's worth stealing a $1 coffee to expose the extreme negligence behind the virtual clerk software. The software is essentially turning the vending machine into an honor box, and presumably the owner of the machine actually wanted proof of payment before vending anything, or they wouldn't have bought the machine. They could have put up a mains-powered samovar with a coin box bolted to it and a sign reading "1 euro per coffee. Call (+39) 355 5555555 to report problems."
It's not even clear to me who is being stolen from. How does Argenta determine how much they are to pay the machine owner? How do they determine how much to pay the machine servicer? If Argenta pays for the coffee, and the owners and servicers are unharmed, potential theft of coffee becomes an incentive to repair their software. Otherwise, you'd just be screwing some vending machine operator whose only failing was to trust Argenta over a dumb(er) coin and note validator.
Thank you for pointing out this article. I am going to be teaching my kids to program and recently installed lord of the test so that we could have an interesting environment to work in.
For other's interested, minetest has a channel [1] on freenode where you can connect with the community in realtime.
I'm using them in several of my game servers as a "meta-repo" that points to other git repositories (for example here: https://github.com/pandorabox-io/pandorabox-mods)
It makes updating, finding/fixing bugs and testing much easier (we are using github's dependabot to update and kick off initial tests)