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“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

(mail.python.org)
2024 points randlet | 1 comments | 12 Jul 18 15:22 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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bla2 ◴[12 Jul 18 16:02 UTC] No.17515883[source]▶
> I don't ever want to have to fight so hard for a PEP and find that so many people despise my decisions.

Leading a large open source project must be terrible in this age of constant outrage :-(

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sjm-lbm ◴[12 Jul 18 16:09 UTC] No.17515955[source]▶
It's PHP and not Python, but every time I read something like this from a major open source figure, I always think of this old PHP mailing list thread:

https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=50696

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Y_Y ◴[12 Jul 18 16:24 UTC] No.17516108[source]▶
That's a good read. I feel like the "customer is always right" mentality does quite a bit of harm to OSS support.

Also reminds me of that dev (who I can't seem to search up) who had their email printed as part of a open-source software license in a car manual and would get ridiculous email from people who had car trouble.

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Alex3917 ◴[12 Jul 18 17:48 UTC] No.17516964[source]▶
> "customer is always right" mentality does quite a bit of harm to OSS support.

It goes both ways. All too often people promote their new library on HN and Reddit, wait until a bunch of people are using it as a dependency, and then abandon it without even telling anyone whether or not it’s abandoned.

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1. cf498 ◴[12 Jul 18 18:22 UTC] No.17517252{4}[source]▶
There is a fundamental difference between the extreme of stuff like GnuPGP, OpenSSL and other extreme of stuff someone created over the weekend and was nice enough to make available

I dont want to know, how much of core infrastructure is resting on the shoulder of overworked and burned out BDFL. This isnt a ego complex in most cases, but the knowledge that without someone with their commitment working at the project it will crumble.