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Actix project postmortem

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351–360 of 408 posts

Re: Actix project postmortem

#351
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…

Another user provided a patch, the patch got called "boring" by the maintainer, a passerby snapped with offensive personal attacks and the rest is history.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#352
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...

Gentoo is just a meme spread by some 4chan /g/ board's members. Maybe you meant Arch?

"btw I use Arch" is a meme as well

Re: Actix project postmortem

#353
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lkml doesn't seem to have this problem, and they are the original git users.

So all you need to do is get popular and important enough that several unrelated third parties will mirror and host your communications for you.

Or... publish everything as essentially a log in an openly accessible manner (ie. email as a on a list serv with it's web accessible archive), and places like archive.org will happily squirrel it away for you.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#354
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would have happened identically even if the project had its own hosting, so outsourcing hosting to GitHub isn't a factor in this case.

I wouldn't happen if instead of git, they used fossil.

It seems like the only "Fossilhub" is this: http://chiselapp.com/

I would guess that it would make it very hard to create a community around the project.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#355
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once it's public and people depend on it you can't retract it like that. His goal was to make his work public, not private.

You basically can. The cost of free stuff like this is "be nice to the guy giving it to you" or at least don't be actively abusive about it. If the community won't pay that price, expect it to evaporate.

This goes both way though. Be nice when people submit patches especially when you reject them.

The abusive comment seems to have been a knee-jerk response from someone dissatisfied by the "it's boring" comment about a proof-of-concept patch.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#356
post #244

The entitlement in this thread is astounding. Don't like how the project is maintained? Fork it. If you don't have anything nice to say to the person who gave you the code _for free_, then just don't say anything at all.

Especially weird seeing as Github has made forking a very smooth way to work with a project. You fork it, make the changes you want, and then make the changes available upstream. If upstream vanishes, your fork is still around. If upstream doesn't want to merge, people can use your fork instead. And, if your changes are that much better, eventually make it the de-facto standard version of the project.

Yes, and it happens all the time in other projects. There's always "so-and-so's fork that implements feature X and changes Y", and it's awesome that that's a possibility since it means no project is held hostage by its maintainer, and that differences in priorities don't mean the code can't be useful for a range of use cases.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> "This is everyone's fault who didn't dogpile the people who were being terrible." That presumes that "dogpiling" would actually stop the behavior, rather than getting people to dig in their heels and further inflame tempers.

Even so, it can serve two purposes: the author feels defended and acknowledged and the author feels relieved as the heat is, at least temporarily, directed at someone else. And this is the worst case scenario.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#358
post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "This is everyone's fault who didn't dogpile the people who were being terrible." That presumes that "dogpiling" would actually stop the behavior, rather than getting people to dig in their heels and further inflame tempers.

Even so, it can serve two purposes: the author feels defended and acknowledged and the author feels relieved as the heat is, at least temporarily, directed at someone else. And this is the worst case scenario.

The author feels defended, but the subject of the dogpiling feels attacked. Maybe that leads to deescalation, but that's far from a foregone conclusion. Bullying bullies often further normalizes the act of bullying in the eyes of the bullied bully, as well as potentially normalizing bullying in the eyes of observers.

There are better ways to handle situations like this.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#359
post #301
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> you implicitly promise and signed up for Think about this. Do you really think it makes any sense to try to hold people to promises inferred by alternate parties that aren’t even providing any consideration in return? Just think about that.

A large amount of human interactions work this way. It's fuzzy and messy, with many shades of gray, but the world is filled with implicit promises with varying degrees of commitment and severity.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#360
post #341

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 w…

> Th e artifacts of these little meltdowns are exactly the kinds of things your upper management will cite the next time you suggest using FOSS vs. whatever vendor they're about to push down your throat. Yes, this is what I don't understand - we spent decades fighting the perception that open source could never be as good as proprietary commercial software. Now that we've mostly convinced our bosses, we want to turn…

>you're telling me to expect that the upstream author will take their code offline

Yes. If a company shuts down, who is to blame when the downloads are no longer available?

No offense, but your build process is lacking if you are affected by a project disappearing from the internet.. You should be bundling all of your libraries with your final artifact.

This is a prime example of relying on the cloud without a continuity plan.

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