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Homebrew 1.4.0

brew.sh

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Re: Homebrew 1.4.0

#181

Post by kelnos »

Crontab wrote: post #119
drinchev wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really sad. I always thought there are lots of companies, acting like WhatsApp ( $1,000,000 donation to FreeBSD [1] ) and return back value to open source, the same way they got value out of it. I'm really surprised that instead of "lots" I have to write "some". I also think that it's a much bigger win, financially and for P.R., to donate some of the profits, instead of paying the taxes in selected tax-paradise…

I totally agree with you but at the same time - we can't tell people something is free and then get upset when they treat it as such.

We don't; unfortunately English is silly and uses the same word for "no-cost" as for "open".

While we implicitly give away the software for no cost, we don't really try to brand it as such (though for some, lack of cost is certainly a big plus).

It's a shame "open source" got co-opted by the OSI and the Free Software purists are left to continue to use "free". I doubt something like "libre" would catch on; some people use it, but it doesn't seem to be used widely enough.

Re: Homebrew 1.4.0

#182

Post by kelnos »

ufmace wrote: post #38
drinchev wrote: post #4

The Patreon page says they receive $177 per month. That's too low for a project with such a high popularity and usage. I read somewhere ( and I bet ) it's used by Google / Facebook / Apple employees.

Reminds me of one of patio11's posts somewhere. I don't remember which one, but the gist is that big companies basically can't donate to tipjars, patreons, etc. But if you make it a product with an enterprise option for support or something, they'll gladly pay tens of thousands a month.

Only true in a fairly narrow sense. At my company we use a ton of open source software. We have support contracts for a few of the big-ticket/core pieces, but I doubt anyone would even think to bother to pay for support for the vast majority of OSS we use.

Re: Homebrew 1.4.0

#183

Post by kelnos »

eridius wrote: post #163
yashap wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homebrew is an awesome, super useful piece of software that people put in tonnes of effort to maintain, for free. Your complaint was indeed worded rudely. Also, re: the “why” behind this commit, “to avoid copious workarounds in formulae” is already a pretty good description, I can see why he didn’t feel the need to elaborate. Remember that maintainers of projects like Homebrew have to deal with an endless stream of c…

It wasn't my complaint. And no, that's not a good description, because it gives me literally zero information to go on in order to find out what the workarounds were, how many formula actually needed them, and what the problems were that necessitated this. > Remember that maintainers of projects like Homebrew have to deal with an endless stream of complaints and feature requests Yeah, that's what happens with popular…

> And no, that's not a good description, because it gives me literally zero information to go on in order to find out what the workarounds were, how many formula actually needed them, and what the problems were that necessitated this.

Why do you feel that you're entitled to this information? And/or that providing this information is a good use of the maintainer's unpaid volunteer time (and that it's immediately obvious to the maintainer that it would be)?

> Good projects are able to handle this in a way that doesn't alienate the community or future contributors.

Homebrew is one such project. Empirically, they have an active community and sufficient contributions to keep the project robust and growing. That doesn't mean that they're going to be perfectly nice and polite to everyone, bending over backward to every user's whim. Sometimes someone is going to feel off-put as you have. But, clearly, most of the time people have positive experiences, so I'm sure they're satisfied with their performance.

> ... doing this for free does not remove the obligations he has to the community.

The only obligations I expect from an OSS maintainer is that they won't be negligent or malicious -- that is, they will work hard to avoid catastrophic bugs that destroy data or open security holes. Even given that, I accept that those sorts of things may happen due to innocent mistakes. Beyond that, I pay nothing, so I expect nothing.

This sort of thing reminds me of really the only negative I've experienced as an open source maintainer: users with feelings of entitlement.

Re: Homebrew 1.4.0

#184

Post by notyourwork »

spiralganglion wrote: post #62
blackRust wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look into the OS version analytics, there are 397 events registered from "macOS (10.14)". That's the next version of macOS :) https://brew.sh/analytics/os-version/

My immediate thought is that this is spoofed. I doubt anyone at Apple would be silly enough to allow software on an unannounced OS to freely send out analytic data. I expect they'd have some sort of filtering applied either right on their dev/test machines (something like Little Snitch, though surely built in-house) or at the network level.

You’ve never worked at a big company like Apple or Facebook have you ?

Re: Homebrew 1.4.0

#185

Post by kelnos »

gutnor wrote: post #175
felixgallo wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck writing your own version and supporting it. Be sure to post your progress.

Ah, the passive-aggressive old school OSS defence. That's not an argument, that's basic herd mentality and can literally apply to any kind of critic legitimate or otherwise. Even Linus does not get a pass nowadays and there is really no reason on HN where we can be so critical of even the most minor design mistake.

I think the parent's dismissal is unfortunate in its nonchalance, but ultimately is correct.

Look, open source maintainers don't owe anyone anything. It behooves them to behave in a positive manner in order to encourage people to contribute, and, well, just because being nice tends to give you a good reputation. But that doesn't mean they're not still people. Sometimes they'll be curt or terse after someone asks a question about a decision that has already been beaten to death because they're just tired of talking about it. Maybe they just had an argument with a friend or family member and aren't in the best frame of mind. Maybe they're just having a bad day.

And that's ok. That's just human nature. As long as the majority of interactions with users is positive, everything's going to be fine. A few people might get their feelings stepped on here and there, and that's truly unfortunate, but I'd also hope that those people give the maintainers the benefit of the doubt and recognize that one bad interaction should hopefully not sour all the positive value they've gotten out of the maintainer's work.

Sure, if there's a huge pattern of abuse, that's a problem. But I submit that a one-off issue submitter is not qualified to assess if there's a pattern or not, especially right after they've just been rebuffed and still feel bad about it.

Re: Homebrew 1.4.0

#186

Post by kelnos »

danra wrote: post #130
orbitur wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's definitely bad that Apple stopped supporting PowerPC Macs just 3 years after they sold the last machines, expecting any support at all 10 years later is ridiculous. What ties people to PowerPC these days? Surely the speed and power consumption of the latest Intel machines is 100x better?

10.6 is still used by a lot of people on Intel processors, and compiling for it on a modern platform involves the hacks I mentioned.

Any ideas why, though? I can understand not wanting to be on the latest-shiny until the inevitable initial bugs are fixed... but does Apple even provide security updates for 10.6?

Re: Homebrew 1.4.0

#188

Post by always_good »

eridius wrote: post #162
jonchang wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not much of an argument to say "well, it's not really that rude". Is it generous and gracious to communicate with people despite their rudeness? Sure. But should it an obligation, particularly for an open-source maintainer? Absolutely not. Nor do I buy the "public forum" argument. You direct your writing to the audience you have (i.e., the person that asked you a question rudely), not an imagined audience that m…

Saying the error message was terrible is barely rude at all. The only real problem with it is it's non-specific. And the poster edited their message to change the wording immediately anyway, the maintainer was only annoyed because GitHub emailed him the original contents of the comment. So the maintainer took an extremely minor just-barely-qualifies-as-a slight and decided to react about as bad as you possibly can. I…

In my experience, low tolerance for negativity is a form of burn out dealing with people.

Even the thimble of energy required to ignore a comment is yet another thimble of energy taken from the pool when all you're doing is helping somebody.

The hard line approach might seem silly in isolation, but I don't think it's unreasonable. The slow creep of community negativity has burned me out on one of my own projects, a forum I run.

One perk of zero tolerance is that it spares you energy for more important decisions. People are quick to point out that it comes at the expense of alienating some folks, but nobody ever seems to care about discouraging the people actually doing the work.

Re: Homebrew 1.4.0

#189

Post by eridius »

kelnos wrote: post #183
eridius wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't my complaint. And no, that's not a good description, because it gives me literally zero information to go on in order to find out what the workarounds were, how many formula actually needed them, and what the problems were that necessitated this. > Remember that maintainers of projects like Homebrew have to deal with an endless stream of complaints and feature requests Yeah, that's what happens with popular…

> And no, that's not a good description, because it gives me literally zero information to go on in order to find out what the workarounds were, how many formula actually needed them, and what the problems were that necessitated this. Why do you feel that you're entitled to this information? And/or that providing this information is a good use of the maintainer's unpaid volunteer time (and that it's immediately obvio…

If you don’t want to engage with the community, then don’t. But if you do it behooves you to behave in a manner that respects your users and the community. Doing otherwise is how you lose that community. It’s not “entitlement” to expect the Homebrew maintainers to be good stewards of the project and the community.

Re: Homebrew 1.4.0

#190

Post by derefr »

ketralnis wrote: post #41
bluedino wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant, what do you prefer about one vs the other

I don't know what to tell you, I like it better. Different flavours for different folks. I never know what to make of "people still use ______?!" comments

> I never know what to make of "people still use ______?!" comments

Usually people are assuming a network-effect that would make using not-Foo when Foo has "won" problematic. Like, imagine using MySpace as your social network today. It'd be a ghost town and nobody you knew would be on it.

In this case, I imagine people would expect that MacPorts either wouldn't have as wide a selection of packages, or wouldn't keep 100% of its packages constantly up-to-date, or some combination of the two.

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