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Actix project postmortem

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Re: Actix project postmortem

#331

Post by undecisive »

KirinDave wrote: post #232
Touche wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He held the door open for a lot of people. Some people spit at him as they walked through. He doesn't want to hold the door open any more, he's done it enough. He didn't sign up to be a doorman for life.

This idea that replacing unsafe code with safe code is "spitting" is unhealthy in the extreme. I don't understand why the author felt so defensive about accepting packages. As far as I can tell, they've always had this attitude. Why even make a project open source if you don't want to consider patches? The whole idea is that even if you think a thing is boring, someone else may not and they'll do that work for the co…

I know why I might.

Here's an analogy for you. When you pour yourself a glass of pop, and you over-pour - do you then pour the drink back into the bottle?

I know some people that would return that drink to the bottle, and some that would rather pour that little bit into the sink. Those that would "backwash" believe that the bottle will be fine - sure, you've maybe transferred a little bacteria in, but it probably won't cause any problems. Those that throw it away believe that the hygiene of the bottle - even from a clean glass - would otherwise be compromised.

So if you come to my battle-tested codebase, and tell me "Hey, I've made you code better. It now has a theoretical metric of cleanness, instead of your proven metric of cleanness" - you may well have just introduced a bug. I now need to test your code, ensure it meets my real-world standards of cleanness. And maybe it does! Maybe your code has fixed a glacially-slow memory leak, but I won't see that. Maybe your code has introduced a complex interaction that none of my examples exploit, but other people's examples blow up because of it.

Maybe the bottle of pop will be fine. Maybe in a couple of days time, when I have guests over, the unhealthy layer of scum floating in my mother-in-law's glass will make me look bad.

Either way, it's a lot of work, and little certainty, and only theoretical benefit - vs no work, and full certainty in the real-world correctness of my code.

And it's a question of which do I value more - my big bottle of pop, or the dribble you'd rather give me back.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#333

Post by NoodleIncident »

steveklabnik wrote: post #271
Traster wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking for a long time that one of the problems with these online shitstorms is that the adults in the room are silent. It would have been so much better if the senior people in the Rust community stepped in to actually say "Hey, we're all using it, yes it's got issues, but thanks for your contribution and don't worry about the idiots". Instead we've got senior people in the Rust community waiting until t…

It's a tricky balance. This is also sort of where I was getting at in my post with the "unofficial" bit; because /r/rust is not official, we do not look into it. And because this happened on Reddit, there was no real opportunity to actually step in. It's quite possible this is simply a failure on our part.

Unofficial subreddits are hard to reason about. Within the context of reddit, they are still the most official place to talk about a thing they like. And even worse, those are the people likely to only interact with the "community" on reddit, forming an echochamber where they think the unofficial subreddit's opinion is some sort of majority.

In rust's case, it probably is worth diverting some of the existing manpower for moderating online discussion to reddit. I think that the harsher this moderation is, the less attractive the subreddit will be to the reddit-only echochamber, as an added bonus. But this is only possible because you already have people involved with online discussion on other sites. In most cases, if reddit or twitter keeps talking about you and keeps saying dumb stuff, you just have to ignore it. This is how r/competitiveoverwatch is treated; everyone knows that the stuff they say there doesn't matter, and that they don't represent more than a tiny fraction of the people watching the OWL matches. Even some of the people posting there know it. The players and casters still seem to read it, but for the most part just laugh about how dumb their opinions are.

In this case, I don't know why the maintainer took some redditor's comment so seriously, when they said that they should not write rust anymore. This is just a separate issue that anyone with "fame" has to deal with, ignoring critics who are idiots, nothing to do with reddit really.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#334

Post by [deleted] »

rat9988 wrote: post #307
torstenvl wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you seriously claiming that food contamination is a "binary" thing? That it's impossible for food to be only a little contaminated, at a level that won't make you "get sick and die?" Its common knowledge that a certain amount of food contamination is considered safe. And, although specifics are not generally common knowledge, it's easy enough to find that, e.g., the FDA views I don't think hyperbole is helpful to…

>Are you seriously claiming that food contamination is a binary thing? That it's impossible for food to be only a little contaminated, at a level that won't make you "get sick and die?" >I'm sorry, but I think you're being disingenuous. Every little kid knows there's some small amount of nasty stuff that's allowed in things like bread (grasshoppers in the wheat fields caught in the combines) and peanut butter because…

[deleted]

Re: Actix project postmortem

#335

Post by saagarjha »

tastroder wrote: post #183
saagarjha wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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

Of course they don’t. But I don’t see why they couldn’t have made an issue along the lines of “I’m stepping down, I’d like someone else to take over the project”. (Still reading through the other writeup.)

Re: Actix project postmortem

#336

Post by geofft »

shkkmo wrote: post #161
geofft wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not. You can get professional (but not necessarily timely) support from me for multiple projects I maintain on GitHub, for free. For many people, their personal interest in open source is writing code for fun and showing it off. For others, it's making a product that people can rely on. The second one is my motivation; don't take that away from me.

The distinction between "amatuer" and "professional" is literally the motivation for the action, i.e. if you are doing it for enjoyment vs if you are doing it to get paid or advance your career. If you are making products that people can rely on primarily because you enjoy it, you are literally an amatuer. There are figurative connotations of quality and polish implicit with those terms, but I find those connotations…

Sure. I'm not saying I am a professional. I'm saying I will provide professional-style support (according to the connotation), just not necessarily in a timely fashion, and it's demoralizing when other people say you should avoid my amateur software because they're leaning on the connotations of "amateur" and "professional."

Re: Actix project postmortem

#337

Post by saagarjha »

The_rationalist wrote: post #192
saagarjha wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the downsides to GitHub is that it stores a lot of state that Git cannot capture, and is at the mercy of project maintainers to continue existing unaltered.

But forks prevent that, right?

No, forks don’t include issues or pull requests, among other things. Another problem is with “canonical links”: people will link to comments on the “original” project, which are at the mercy of maintainers to not be edited or deleted.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#338

Post by geofft »

dangerface wrote: post #204
geofft wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of people are complaining that the code is unsafe while the author thought it was safe enough for them. How many nines is safe, depends on the person. There's a very precise definition of this, it's not a matter of opinion. The code exposed a public API that was not marked "unsafe" that allowed you to construct (definitely intentionally, perhaps unintentionally) two mutable references to the same object. > So…

> The bug reporter actually looked at the code, determined it was unsafe, and reported a bug. That's what everyone wants an OSS user to do. No again this is end user entitlement, you are not an end user you are a developer, if you discover a bug you are supposed to provide a patch to fix it not expect some one else to fix it for you. If you depend on some one else's code it is your job to do due diligence on that dep…

The Actix website encourages end users to report bugs: "If you think you found a bug it's best to go to the github directly."

If you're claiming that taking those directions seriously is entitlement and that it's less entitled to second-guess the maintainer and do what you think they meant even if it's the opposite of what they said....

Re: Actix project postmortem

#339

Post by saagarjha »

hardbop200 wrote: post #318
saagarjha wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a legal, not a social statement. Following the letter of the document that governs your work doesn’t mean you still can’t do something that would be inconsiderate.

I am honestly confused by this line of thinking. what should projects do in your opinion? should there be a LEGAL-LICENSE and SOCIAL-LICENSE? I believe that the legal is the "top-level" statement that sets expectations all the way down.

Legal documents don’t really make an affordance for what would be impolite versus what would be against the license. Usually I think the unwritten expectations work out ok (for example, in a project I help maintain I recently wrote out an apology for stepping away from development and ignoring contributions to fulfill these obligations) but perhaps writing it down in some sort of Code of Conduct style document might be beneficial.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#340

Post by zokier »

kjs3 wrote: post #214
zokier wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AN…

Yeah, that's really the core of the problem, isn't it. People trying to impose an implicit understanding (which is nothing more that 'this is what I want the world to be like') when there's an explicit statement of 'this is how it actually is'. The attitude baffles me. So many times I've had someone come in all butthurt and say 'I know it was in the contract, but I didn't think they'd actually enforce it'.

> So many times I've had someone come in all butthurt and say 'I know it was in the contract, but I didn't think they'd actually enforce it'.

or the converse situation "I know I used liberal license but I'm still going to raise hell if people actually do what the license allows"

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