271–280 of 764 posts
Open source burnout is real. I'm sure the allure of giving back by creating something useful fades when people constantly criticize your work, especially when you look at the personal and professional sacrifices you're making to produce free software.
I've begged GitHub to institute forms of government for repos. For X action to happen, Y percent of the pool of people in the Z list need to approve it. Membership of the Z list is granted when W percent of the T pool approve it. Modifying the rules of government of this repo can only happen when L percent of the R pool approve it. And on and on... I could imagine a city or state government actually having its laws e…
Technology cannot solve social problems
Have your debate in email, but then VOTE in a way that can be automated.
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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.
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 o…
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When I was much younger I started building a ray casting engine. I was having trouble wrapping my brain around how to render the floors so ... I emailed Ken Silverman. It escapes me now _why_ I emailed him. I certainly had no idea the gravity of who he was (for those also unaware, he is perhaps most famous for creating the Build engine used in games like Duke Nukem 3D). I believe I was under the false assumption at t…
I've done nothing worth mentioning here, but I have received a couple emails asking detailed questions about things I'd done and forgotten about years ago or looking for early career advice, and I'm more surprised and honored that someone took the time to appreciate my work than anything.
Guido van Rossum has given his life for this language and besides the obligatory 'thanks for all the fish' there isn't even a single person who stops the clock to evaluate what went wrong that they pushed out the person that started this all.
Instead it's 'kthxbye' and they're already dividing up the cake to see who gets to rule.
Not the nicest moment in the history of FOSS, I wonder what kind of a mess will ensue when Linus steps down.
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This is a particularly ill-chosen thread to deliberately try to re-flame this flamewar. Most threads are.
> This is a particularly ill-chosen thread to deliberately try to re-flame this flamewar Apparently it's the right thread to be rude and to assign intentions to people you don't know though? And all because they dared say their opinion on a subject you're sensitive about? How about that: people can have any opinion they like on Python 3, including considering it a botched migration process and a ho-hum update. And it…
I've begged GitHub to institute forms of government for repos. For X action to happen, Y percent of the pool of people in the Z list need to approve it. Membership of the Z list is granted when W percent of the T pool approve it. Modifying the rules of government of this repo can only happen when L percent of the R pool approve it. And on and on... I could imagine a city or state government actually having its laws e…
Why is representative democracy the best system for managing a repo? Will there also be an option for pure democracy? Can I fork your socialist utopia and form an authoritarian dictatorship? I don’t see why this system would ever be beneficial to a real world government. We already have checks and balances, if GitHub did it all who decides how GitHub works? What’s the benefit?
> Why is representative democracy the best system for managing a repo?
There's also the issue of practicality. Voting on issues is a time and resource intensive process. It's just impractical to have everybody vote directly on every single decision.
> Can I fork your socialist utopia and form an authoritarian dictatorship?
> I don’t see why this system would ever be beneficial to a real world government.
- Nations have many orders of magnitude more resources than... Python
- Practically speaking the vast majority of people can belong to only a single nation, whereas most developers probably used a handful of languages in the last 24h
- Nobody asked to be born into a country, and most people on Earth can't simply choose a new one
- The decisions made by nations are literally life and death for millions of people
The relevant factors for determining the course of Python's governance model bear far more resemblance to your neighborhood restaurant's menu decisions than the ways in which governments are elected.
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Wasn't it nice that you could reply to this comment over the web rather than physically going to the commenter and telling them what you thought? Boy, this technology sure gave a helpful assist to the social problem of communication.
OP wants code to legislate trust problems within a small, closed group, however no amount of code can ever solve trust problems within a small, closed group. No amount of code thrown at people mismanaging their relationship with other people will ever help people more effectively manage their relationship with those people -- it just creates artificial obstacles that further exacerbate or obscure the problem. There i…
That's still a social problem.
What I want is that the mechanical process of doing code reviews, accepting pull requests, and orchestrating the Access Control Lists, and the membership of them, can be implemented by the code repo.
Rather than giving unfettered power to a small list of owners, who could literally do anything to the repo. And if they all get hit by the same bus, then we're SOL.
Heck, I want a Deadman Switch, too. If Github doesn't hear from me in 90 days, even after emailing me to get my attention, then ownership of this repo should be assigned to this other person. If that fails, on to this other person, etc.
"only a fool would believe a bunch of codified rules spread across a couple of software functions could ever perfectly mediate the complexities of a community of people in every possible scenario."
Or someone who has experienced such a system at a company, and wishes the rest of the world had similar functions.
Note that I'm happy to allow for escape hatches... Such as we could always Fork the repo.
"What if 51%"
Then I fork the repo.
What do you do if the 1 single owner of a repo turns out to be a fanatic?
You and twenty other people all fork the repo, and then debate ensues about who is the One True Repo.
I'm suggesting that there's a smarter way to handle the problem of a small number of people having absolute power over our repos.
And if you're smart, you leave in a provision for completely changing the governance, in case you screw it up. Or you just fork. Like we do today.
Excited to see what Guido wants to do next, enjoy it!
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I had the same experience. Suddenly Emacs Gnus reader stopped working, about 11:00 on a Friday morning. I posted the bug and had a reply from Lars Ingebrigtsen with an explanation and a workaround by 13:00. I think it was fixed by the beginning of the following week. My experience of trying to get help from Microsoft on the other hand is, well let's just say not quite so impressive; they kept me on hold for 45 minute…
Back in the days Microsoft would have amazing customer support. And I'm talking about "API customers", many times I've seen them go out of their way to fix third party programs not working correctly by adapting their platform, it was a very efficient process. I guess that doesn't work as well at their current scale, or they care less because they're not building up market share.
This kind of thing probably doesn't even scale with itself, since there are only so many acrobatics your code can go through before no one can even understand why it's doing something, let alone add new workarounds. So the first K broken programs get special treatment, and the others face a much higher bar to get the same treatment.