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

(mail.python.org)
2024 points randlet | 5 comments | 12 Jul 18 15:22 UTC | HN request time: 1.059s | 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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jstarfish ◴[12 Jul 18 18:00 UTC] No.17517068[source]▶
Not using toy libraries for production systems is a lesson every young developer learns early on in their career.
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1. Alex3917 ◴[12 Jul 18 19:12 UTC] No.17517678[source]▶
If you put something out there and no one uses it then fine. But once it has hundreds of commits and issues and over 1,000 stars on GitHub, then I think you have some responsibility to people using the thing you’ve created -- if you’ve been actively promoting it as something everyone should use.
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2. titanix2 ◴[12 Jul 18 19:37 UTC] No.17517913[source]▶
No they aren’t. The code is open source anyway so if the dependency is important enough for your project, fork it. Or pay for support.
3. jstarfish ◴[12 Jul 18 20:27 UTC] No.17518331[source]▶
It's a free product, not a child support obligation. Even if you do walk away, it's open source and can be maintained by anybody interested in stepping up. This is the price of adoption, not guaranteed updates for life from the creator.

But I get where you're coming from. It's even worse on Steam, where developers will actually collect money during the "early access" phase and then walk away once a (closed-source) tech demo is half-complete.

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4. Alex3917 ◴[12 Jul 18 20:38 UTC] No.17518396[source]▶
> This is the price of adoption, not guaranteed updates for life from the creator.

I’m not saying anyone should be obligated to do free work. This issue is that most people don’t feel comfortable publishing a public fork without the blessing of the creator, or at least knowing the creator no longer intends to work on the project in the near future. So you end up with these situations where there are thousands of people running production systems with unmerged security patches because the creator can’t be bothered to spend 30 seconds to write a one sentence reply to an email.

Short of being in a coma, I consider that toxic behavior.

And just to be clear I’m taking about situations where there are lots of open PRs but no signs of life for months or years on end, not situations where the creator just went on vacation for a few weeks.

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5. lstodd ◴[13 Jul 18 00:07 UTC] No.17519628{3}[source]▶
eww, that's called entitlement.

no one promised you anything. you merged some code into your project. now deal with the consequences. be responsible for your work.