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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: 0.218s | 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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krylon ◴[12 Jul 18 16:45 UTC] No.17516371[source]▶
OTOH, way back, when I had a TV receiver card by Hauppage, and a new Linux kernel broke something, I posted a description of my troubles on Usenet, and within 24 hours, the person who had written the Video4Linux subsystem replied asking for more details (which I gladly provided), and a few days later, the bug was fixed.

That, I think, was the most awesome "customer support" experience of my life. I did make a point of being polite about it, however, which I consider a ground rule for dealing with people, especially if I want something from them.

But it was so awesome to post to a random usenet group about a driver problem and have the person who wrote the driver personally approach you for details. You don't get that with Windows, for sure. ;-)

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1. Kadin ◴[12 Jul 18 19:00 UTC] No.17517581[source]▶
Yep. This attitude isn't dead, assuming you approach the developer via the right/preferred venue, and are polite, and they are still actively maintaining the project. And it really helps if you give a thorough bug report!

I recently submitted a bug report to a fairly niche OSS package that I use, and within a few hours the author replied (on GitHub) something like "oh wow, yeah that's an edge case but I definitely want to fix it, can you send me the test data you used..." and once I gave him the test data, he had it fixed in two hours and now anybody who grabs the source won't have to deal with that bug.

It was great, and even though I didn't do anything except write up a bug ticket properly (the same way I'd expect anyone on my team at work to do it), the software is a little better now.