Right now there's no question that they deserve to be called idiots. What's happening now was easily preventable and shouldn't have ever happened under any circumstances.
It's actually
fucking amazing that this is first MAJOR bug in 4 years.
, as all critics ignore because they are clueless and it invalidates their criticism,
the bug isn't in bitcoin at all! It is in some versions of BDB on some platforms. The developers wisely chose a better database for 0.8, but unfortunately the bug manifested itself in a bad way (it could have been worse, e.g. if the bug in BDB made remote code execution or altering old blocks possible) before almost all nodes had upgraded.
I've seen at least one thread claiming that it's not a bug in BDB as much as a misconfiguration.
It is a question of wording - if we assume everybody knows all facts: you may call it a bug in bitcoin, that the BDB was used misconfigured.
What configuration will work in all cases? This may be impossible to tell, because it is impossible to prove if bitcoind and all it's components works correctly in all cases. This follows from
The Halting Problem described by Alan Turing.
Testing and avoiding bugs is important, but it is just as important to handle situations like this when they occur, and I think this one was handled very well. A hard fork with two parallel blockchains going on forever was avoided. Because bugs will happen. No amount of testing or algorithm proving can eliminate all bugs.
Anyway, no need to insult people here from the very beginning of the thread - but this seems also a characteristic of this bitcoin forum(s) that this is tolerated. :-(
I have this user on ignore. I am not alone, as you can see from the piss yellow background of his ignore link. Nothing even remotely clueful, interesting or constructive comes from his keyboard.