Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Actix project postmortem

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 408 posts

Re: Actix project postmortem

#91

Post by StavrosK »

smashedtoatoms wrote: post #79
stavros wrote: post #35

Whatever drawbacks Actix may have had, this entitlement has gone too far. There is no defensible reason to tell someone "never write Rust again" because you don't like the code they're making available to you. We need something to remind us that we should be civil and grateful for FOSS contributions. I recently saw a talk by Atwood about good discourse and how you should remind people of your values before they write…

"We need something to remind us that we should be civil and grateful for FOSS contributions." You mean like having the legitimate risk that maintainers will take their ball and go home when people are cruel and others stand around and let it happen? This is everyone's fault who didn't dogpile the people who were being terrible. We all need to be calling out people being horrible, and provide a little emotional suppor…

No, I mean something less remote and which looks less like a random act of God, something that people can read before engaging in discussion and not easily dismiss because "it probably won't happen". We need to raise the level of discourse across the board, not just prevent the most egregious of negativity.

I want people to enter the discussion with the mindset "this is a volunteer effort so I will aim to be productive in my disagreement", rather than "fuck this guy".

Re: Actix project postmortem

#92

Post by UserIsUnused »

Steve0 wrote: post #76
UserIsUnused wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Abandon is different from deleting everything. Ofc, git is distributed, so someone should have a copy of the repo, even if it's not updated. Edit: disregard post, apparently it's just moved to the personal account.

Not deleted. > I moved actix-net and actix-web project to my personal github account. I will make decision during next couple days what to do. I don’t want to see the project becomes ghost of what it was. Maintainers must understand how everything work, but don’t anyone who does and those who could are busy with other projects. At the moment I am planing to make repos private and then delete them (will remove benchma…

I see thanks

Re: Actix project postmortem

#93

Post by j-pb »

siscia wrote: post #67
j-pb wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In open source you give and take. The actix author almost certainly (unless they deploy their own kernel) has profited immensely from other peoples work. This is because as a community we have realized that we don't sell libraries, we sell stuff build with them, so we all win when we share. It is your choice to use open source software without open sourcing your own work or without contributing. But by engaging in op…

Dude, sorry to break this to you! But basically any widely used software is supported by major companies just to avoid this problem. Libraries, compilers and kernels alike. If you want to rely on software being there, you should be ready to pay for people to support it. > This is because as a community we have realized that we don't sell libraries, we sell stuff build with them, so we all win when we share. It is cle…

Companies should contribute their fair share by supporting open sources projects monetarily, definitely!

But that is a different issue, from the behavioral standards we as a community uphold implicitly, and which are broken by pulling a "left-pad" incident.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#94

Post by dangerface »

teddyh wrote: post #23
tsukurimashou wrote: post #11

"Ok... So that was unprofessional. If you don't want to maintain a project anymore, you give it to someone else and link to that repo in your README. This just screwed me over big time." https://github.com/actix/actix-web/issues/1#issuecomment-575... These kind of entitled attitude is probably exactly why the guy just removed everything. More details / discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/epszt7/ac…

> These kind of entitled attitude If you offer code to the public – and present it as an active, dependable project – professional behavior is exactly what you implicitly promise and signed up for . If you can’t offer that (at any time, and for any reason), then you should immediately make that clear, front-and-center, to any current and future users. It isn’t “entitlement” on part of the users – the users are making…

> professional behavior is exactly what you implicitly promise and signed up for.

Wise up. Professionals get paid, if you aren't paying some one they are not a professional. This is the reason why opensource projects provide professional support for pay, for professionals who need professional support.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#95

Post by qwerty456127 »

mosselman wrote: post #44
qwerty456127 wrote: post #17

People should really learn to ignore the emotional channel of the comments they receive. Just try to figure out if the message contains any useful information with a quick glance, extract it if it does and ignore the rest. People have to shit - that's physiologically inevitable, and there are people who do it in the streets and there are people who shit in comments/messages. Why take them serious?

Should they ignore the negative parts or should people who comment be mindful of the fact that a lot of open source they use is created in someone’s spare time and that they have a human being, not a company? I’d think the latter.

Sure. Both should but that would be naïve to expect the others to do. I write "people should" putting myself in place of the protagonist. Going to the woods don't make drama of the mosquitoes biting you.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#96

Post by Kye »

saagarjha wrote: post #70
Steve0 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard of "implicit promises". For me a promise is by definition explicit. Anything else are assumptions, in this case false assumptions.

In many contexts, there’s often an implicit promise to be courteous to others, even if it’s not defined explicitly.

From my skim of the maintainer's comment, this happened because people didn't keep their end of the promise.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#97

Post by endorphone »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #12
tsukurimashou wrote: post #11

"Ok... So that was unprofessional. If you don't want to maintain a project anymore, you give it to someone else and link to that repo in your README. This just screwed me over big time." https://github.com/actix/actix-web/issues/1#issuecomment-575... These kind of entitled attitude is probably exactly why the guy just removed everything. More details / discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/epszt7/ac…

They're right, it was unprofessional... but since the maintainer is not being paid this is not a professional project. It's a personal project. And this seems like a perfectly personal thing to do with something that's preventing happiness.

Professional pursuits are things related to a vocation, not directly tied to an exchange of money for every interaction under consideration. If you're in the industry of software development, and tie your identity to an open source project, it is de facto professional.

In this example it is held as a significant accomplishment on this individual's linkedin page. Which isn't surprising as professional credibility is a primary motivation driving a lot of open source involvement. We are seeking a different, less direct form of compensation.

So it's fair to say that acting like this is unprofessional.

That doesn't mean it isn't merited, or that they might have been frustrated or had good reason. But professionally they would have been much better served by other means: Simply announcing that they're retiring from the project and encouraging forking and the percolation of a new canonical version, etc.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#98

Post by toyg »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #27
wffurr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy to say, not so easy to do.

Quite easy to do once you realize you can, adjust the mindset and have some practice. There probably is a lot of garbage in your spam folder - do you take it seriously? I used to do tech support and some people (not too many) wrote right out rude or nonsensical (like concluding I hate their religion just from the fact our service failed to suit their specific needs). I would just answer such sort of robotically (if t…

> I used to do tech support

As someone who also "graduated" through the trenches of tech-support, I think you underestimate how much that job hardened you and made you able to evaluate this sort of situations in a more detached way. The ability to calm down, bypass a human, and get to the root of a problem standing behind such human, is a skill that few people develop outside of such jobs. Even in healthcare, where "troubleshooting" agitated people is an almost daily occurrence, not everyone learns to cope.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#99

Post by geofft »

tsukurimashou wrote: post #11

"Ok... So that was unprofessional. If you don't want to maintain a project anymore, you give it to someone else and link to that repo in your README. This just screwed me over big time." https://github.com/actix/actix-web/issues/1#issuecomment-575... These kind of entitled attitude is probably exactly why the guy just removed everything. More details / discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/epszt7/ac…

It's absolutely correct that people don't have obligations simply by putting some code online. But they do have obligations when they start telling people to use their code. We understand this as humans even in realms far from open source: if I see you approaching a door, I am under no obligation to open it just because I'm physically able to, but if I open a door for you, I'd better hold it until you're finished walking through, or I'm a jerk. By holding the door open, I've made an implicit promise that I'm not going to close it on you.

It's not very hard to say, this is a project for my own technical interest, I don't intend to follow Rust norms about use of unsafe, and you shouldn't rely on it, but here's the code if anyone wants to look. That's fine! (And I do think we need to be better about making it common to do that. GitHub has no good tooling for such a repo, for instance: you can't disable pull requests unless you archive the project or make it private.)

But that's not what Actix's docs say. See https://actix.rs/docs/ for instance: there's nothing to the effect that you shouldn't use or rely on it, and everything to the effect that you should. (In case that page gets taken down, it starts, "Actix is your door to developing web services with Rust and this documentation is going to guide you.") On https://actix.rs/community/ it says you should report bugs to GitHub, implying that bug reports are in fact welcome, and there isn't a single statement that the project goals prioritize the author's technical excitement over correct code.

Again, there's nothing wrong with wanting to prefer your technical excitement over having bug-free code. Just be clear about it.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#100

Post by saagarjha »

pmlnr wrote: post #90
saagarjha wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool, you don’t have to work in the project if you don’t want to. But going and nuking it off the face of the earth so nobody can have it is still impolite.

It's good that git clones are all complete, full copies, including history.

And for that I am quite thankful that it is so widely used.
Post reply on HN