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Actix project postmortem

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Re: Actix project postmortem

#181

Post by ryandrake »

jeltz wrote: post #114
zzzcpan wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, maybe people didn't provide detailed enough explanation for the author to understand and merge the patch, so he didn't bother.

Judge for yourself: https://web.archive.org/web/20200116203731/https://github.co...

It seems like the better solution here would have been for the folks who wanted a fixed version of the software to create and maintain a "actix-done-right" fork themselves. This is what we all do in the professional world when a maintainer doesn't want to upstream critical patches for whatever reason.

They're under no obligation to upstream your patch, but it's open source so you're not powerless either! Why so much drama over a rejected PR?

Re: Actix project postmortem

#182

Post by Macha »

ryandrake wrote: post #162
Macha wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very much a "Not deleted _yet_"

With distributed version control, is anything ever really deleted? How does he have the power to delete everyone else's local copy of the project and prevent them all from forking and maintaining it?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22074620

Re: Actix project postmortem

#183

Post by tastroder »

saagarjha wrote: post #147
tastroder wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This person killed the momentum that this project had, much of which was only partly their work. Forks fracture a project’s community and pit the pieces against each other: occasionally they work out, but often they all just fizzle into nothingness. Keeping a project together has value. (Also, note that associated GitHub metadata such as issues has been wiped.)

Reading the description in the root of that project, the community and user base might just as well be attributed to "killing the momentum" if you like (if that's even the case, this seemed to have happened literally hours ago). The issues seem to be intact on the maintainers personal copy of that repository.

I mean, yes, keeping a project together has value, I just don't see where the assumption here comes from that this maintainer has to do that indefinitely or even has to be involved in actively searching for successors in a community they don't feel good about. The maintainer even states being open to suggestions. If nobody steps up, momentum can't have been that great, if somebody does, a fork will live on. That's still in the realm of mild inconvenience, other projects have survived much larger controversy.

edit: the frontpage is currently topped by a more balanced write-up by Steve Klabnik that weighs up, among others, both of these views https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22075076

Re: Actix project postmortem

#184

Post by forgottenpass »

fenwick67 wrote: post #134
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?

The value in stoicism is that it lets people transcend limitations they have control over. It's a tool and comes in many packages (e.g.: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.").

Lots of "people on HN push stoicism" because a great many people in all walks of life share life lessons that can be categorized as stoic.

>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?

This is reductive. If you were to undertake a real appraisal of the ideas with a goal to separate the wheat from the chaff, as well as feel out the boundaries of what is often presented as blanket advice (rather than try to get one over on "people on HN"), the advice people are trying to offer would make more sense.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#185

Post by janoc »

walki wrote: post #30
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I absolutely agree with this. The author has spent an insane amount of time to build all this stuff and instead of getting recognition and/or being payed adequately he is getting shitstorm after shitstrom. As an outsider I have to say that I think what the Rust community has technically achieved is remarkable. But on the social side it is not so bright, avid Rust users constantly spam forums of other programming lang…

Well, no different than any other tech where the community is an echo chamber full of fanboys. Linux used to be like that, especially some of its distros (uhm Gentoo?), cryptocurrency fans are like that, Apple users probably don't need mentioning neither ...

Re: Actix project postmortem

#186

Post by CDSlice »

For context, this comes after yet another unsoundness bug has been found in Actix-web. Normally people in the Rust community don't get very worked up over these because we know that everyone makes mistakes, but the Actix project has had a consistent history of introducing unsoundness through the use of unsafe for dubious reasons like nebulous performance increases or bypassing Rust's safety guarantees (which is what this last one was about). Furthermore, when someone raised this issue and provided a patch to fix it the actix-web maintainer called the patch "boring"[1]. He also censored comments that talked about the unsoundness and eventually deleted the entire issue. This sort of behavior should not be acceptable from any open source maintainer that runs such a large, foundational part of the ecosystem.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200116203731/https://github.co...

Re: Actix project postmortem

#187

Post by setr »

toyg wrote: post #150
j-pb wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you hold the door open for somebody you don't sign shit, yet it's implicit that you don't swing the door in their face.

But you don't hold a door: you are dropping a package on the street and letting people pick it up. Anyone can reuse the cardboard, paint it red, stack it up with other packages, or hang it on their livingroom walls... but there is no guarantee that the package won't contain a bomb, that the cardboard was made by eco-friendly methods, or that it will last one second after getting dropped on the streets.

That's the bare minimum of what you can do, which really just constitutes dumping your code on GitHub, slapping an unmaintained label in the readme, and calling it a day

But we can go beyond that, and start to do more work, and make grander social promises. Calls for a "community" come with the implicit agreement that this codebase now exists for more than just the one person who initialized it. And that you've pushed it into the public, and requested people to treat your repo as the repo, you've taken on certain responsibilities, and made some implicit, or explicit, promises.

Sometimes the job is thrust upon the maintainer accidentally (eg Linus), and sometimes it is requested (apparently in this case?)

But nonetheless it's a natural function of the OSS community, and there are ways to deny the responsibility appropriately, and inappropriately.

But it's there is much more nuance to this than dumping a box, or reading a legal contract (which is never representative of social contracts; it's just the bare minimum to avoid responsibility in the eyes of a lawsuit.)

Re: Actix project postmortem

#188

Post by setr »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #174
toyg wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, it's just the usual delusion of small-but-growing communities. The Python community was great in 2001, a bit less so these days. The Lisp community was probably great at some point in the '70s too. It's just that, with size, the likelihood of attracting undesirable elements inevitably grows until their presence simply cannot be denied. At that point, you either deploy heavy-handed moderation and get branded "unw…

Of course I don't disagree to you, I too think that that reputation is extremely hard to retain. However: 1. It seems that there are/were some language communities noted for their relatively more welcoming atmosphere. If small communities are usually great until it aren't, why don't we see many such communities? There seems to be some truth in this (albeit ultimately fragile) reputation. 2. For this reason, in order…

Re 1, if they're small communities, you don't hear much about them in the first place. And if it's a language community, then the language is probably pitched long before the quality of the community comes into question.

That is, I've never heard anything about the communities for zig, D, beef, futhark, pony, Julia, etc.

But then, I don't think ever seen any comment on their community... Their supporters are too busy trying to justify the language's existence!

Re: Actix project postmortem

#189

Post by swfsql »

j-pb wrote: post #179
toyg wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you don't hold a door: you are dropping a package on the street and letting people pick it up. Anyone can reuse the cardboard, paint it red, stack it up with other packages, or hang it on their livingroom walls... but there is no guarantee that the package won't contain a bomb, that the cardboard was made by eco-friendly methods, or that it will last one second after getting dropped on the streets.

Yes and pushing the archive button is saying "I won't produce any more packages sorry." What they did was climb through everyones window to get the cardboard box back, just as with the npm leftpad incident. Stop painting the narative like people demand some volunteer to do more free work, when all they do is ask to not be actively sabotaged.

No, he didn't break into people's house, started their computers and started deleting stuff. It's all the same as the day before yesterday.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#190

Post by toyg »

j-pb wrote: post #179
toyg wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you don't hold a door: you are dropping a package on the street and letting people pick it up. Anyone can reuse the cardboard, paint it red, stack it up with other packages, or hang it on their livingroom walls... but there is no guarantee that the package won't contain a bomb, that the cardboard was made by eco-friendly methods, or that it will last one second after getting dropped on the streets.

Yes and pushing the archive button is saying "I won't produce any more packages sorry." What they did was climb through everyones window to get the cardboard box back, just as with the npm leftpad incident. Stop painting the narative like people demand some volunteer to do more free work, when all they do is ask to not be actively sabotaged.

No, he just stopped dropping the package on the street every Monday at 7am. Whoever picked up the package in the past, still has it - or had the option to preserve it.

If your workflow relied on a package being delivered every morning, even unchanged, it's your own fault. He never made that guarantee.

Stop painting the narrative like people owe you anything, when you're just failing to correctly evaluate the actual resiliency (non-)guarantees of production pipelines based on random github repositories.

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