Actix project postmortem • Hacker News Board

Re: Actix project postmortem

#131

Post by saagarjha » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 2:05 PM UTC

mabbo wrote: post #119

geofft wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wal…

> 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. This reminds me of an incident years ago. I was on a city bus, very full of people, and we were just about to leav…

In this case, the maintainer made an active and conscious decision to do something that did nothing but hurt everyone using the project. There are no passengers who might benefit here, sadly.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#132

Post by dangerface » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 2:05 PM UTC

geofft wrote: post #99

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 wal…

If some one opens the door for you that was nice of them, they did your work for you, they have no ongoing obligation to maintain the door in an open state.

If some one give you their code that was nice of them, they wrote your code for you, they have no ongoing obligation to maintain your code.

by simply giving you their code they have already provided you with value, a head start for nothing in return, they have opened the door for you, the rest is up to you.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#133

Post by Macha » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 2:07 PM UTC

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…

That's very much a "Not deleted _yet_"

Re: Actix project postmortem

#134

Post by fenwick67 » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 2:08 PM UTC

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?

For some reason lots of people on HN push stoicism as a virtue. Not all of us are 100% unaffected by dealing with jerks, and we like to get ourselves out of toxic environments that make us unhappy. Is that so bad?

Re: Actix project postmortem

#135

Post by saagarjha » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 2:12 PM UTC

dangerface wrote: post #132

geofft wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wal…

If some one opens the door for you that was nice of them, they did your work for you, they have no ongoing obligation to maintain the door in an open state. If some one give you their code that was nice of them, they wrote your code for you, they have no ongoing obligation to maintain your code. by simply giving you their code they have already provided you with value, a head start for nothing in return, they have op…

We’re starting to stretch the metaphor too far, but by opening the door you’ve signaled to me that I can walk through it safely. Closing it abruptly can in some cases be even worse than the alternative, since I could have possibly opened the door myself (written it myself and not invested time in this particular project) or gone through a another door that was also being held open (used another open source project).

Re: Actix project postmortem

#136

Post by beatgammit » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 2:12 PM UTC

logophobia wrote: post #31

teddyuk wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The maintainer can choose whatever style they damn well please, if you don't like it don't use it. What is hard about this?

It's not coding style, it's refusing to investigate use-after-free vulnerabilities in code because it's "boring". Noone should care if a maintainer uses tabs or spaces, or has weird variable naming, but if "coding-style" leads to security issues (due to hand-rolling unsafe memory-primitives), then it is an actual issue, especially if it's for a popular web-framework. Don't like it, don't use it doesn't really apply t…

> somewhat self-inflicted

Let's not start victim-blaming please.

Yes, the maintainer could have made his reasons for making the project more clear, and the maintainer could have been more clear on the intended use of the project (not for production, personal project to see how fast Rust can be, etc). There are a lot of things the maintainer could have done.

However, that doesn't mean there wasn't a problem. There was a ton of negativity around "unsafe" when the author first released the code, and it has kind of become a meme at this point. If a project consistently uses code in an unsafe way, is it really worth spending your time vetting it for your production use case? There are plenty of web severs out there, pick one that aligns with your goals.

For future maintainers of projects, please do yourself a favor and clearly state the intentions of your project. Is it for production use or just a personal project to see how far you can take an idea? Make it clear and get into the habit of reminding people of the project's goals. I am very grateful for projects that do that since it helps me save a ton of time for both the maintainers and myself.

There seems to be a mismatch between the maintainer's expectations of the project and the community's expectations. It's unfortunate that the author decided to pull it, but hopefully this is a lesson to the community to make sure a project is a good fit before diving in with suggestions.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#137

Post by gameswithgo » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 2:12 PM UTC

I would advise people who decide to embark on large, hard projects like this to stop making them free. Make the source open if you want, but charge money. Either for the product, or for support requests, something. This not only filters out entitled assholes, but it gets you money, money that you can maybe use to pay people to help, or at least to buy a beer.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#138

Post by j-pb » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 2:13 PM UTC

siscia wrote: post #106

j-pb wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I believe we should not demand free work from people only because they were nice enough to push their code on GitHub and let stranger use it for free. I work in open source as well at both day job and for "fun" but I fix the issue that I want and if people want something from me as author of whatever, there is going to be a money talk.

To take the metaphor from a different user on this topic: "Its completely ok to not hold the door open for someone, but its extremely impolite to drop them into their face."

The author created a project and advertised it to people, if they don't want to maintain it anymore, sure, no problem.

But deleting it to spite others is considered a d* move.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#139

Post by tastroder » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 2:13 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #131

mabbo wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This reminds me of an incident years ago. I was on a city bus, very full of people, and we were just about to leav…

In this case, the maintainer made an active and conscious decision to do something that did nothing but hurt everyone using the project. There are no passengers who might benefit here, sadly.

Since this seems to be a constant point in this thread but I don't see it: How exactly did that person hurt anybody? They maintained this project for 3(?) years and the code is readily available elsewhere on github now. If there's really that many people being inconvenienced by that, surely somebody else will take over that fork instead.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#140

Post by mfer » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 2:14 PM UTC

Being a maintainer on a popular open source project can be hard. You put expectations on yourself, others put expectations on you, people complain, people trash talk you because they think they can do it better, and so much more.

I think this highlights that maintainers need support systems to help with this. We can use GitHub features to mute or block people. We can have CoCs and try to avoid people who cause issues. But, they still happen and maintainers need help. Someone to talk to, people who have been there, support groups, strategies, and sometimes sabbaticals.

I feel for this guy and hope some time away will help him personally.