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Actix project postmortem

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Re: Actix project postmortem

#371

Post by dodobirdlord »

toyg wrote: post #193
setr wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pushe…

Lawsuits is how society distinguishes the actual social contract from wishful thinking. You are free to establish your own imaginary community based on imaginary rules of etiquette, but everyone else is free to ignore such "rules".

Sure, but people whose behavior is only constrained by law rather than the general expectations of good taste in their community are generally referred to as assholes or with some similar term to indicate that their behavior is disapproved of but not to the extent that it would make sense to prohibit.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#372

Post by bryanrasmussen »

mythz wrote: post #296
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but the arrow of time being what it is you cannot fork something usefully after all the code has been taken away. You can now fork the readme and change that. It's true I think everyone should do what I do which is to fork anything I think I might need at some point , but that isn't what you actually suggested and it isn't what the parent comment was observing could be a problem for people.

As stated clearly in the README: > P.S. I moved actix-net and actix-web project to my personal github account. So he's transferred it to: https://github.com/fafhrd91/actix-web Feel free to fork, take a copy, start a new repo. The project is dual Apache/MIT licensed so feel free to do whatever you want within its very liberal scope. What you're not entitled to do is demand anything from the author or to take up any of…

Sorry, I interpreted that to mean his private account, which was silly.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#373

Post by tumdum_ »

mratsim wrote: post #354
tumdum_ wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fossil has everything built in including fully functioning web interface (in contrast to git).

Re: Actix project postmortem

#374

Post by capableweb »

geofft wrote: post #345
capableweb wrote: post #323

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO This is part of the MIT license. Many other open source and free software licenses contain the same thing. It's simple, people provide software they write in their free time or "sponsored" by their company, in return they get nothing and you should expect nothing more than the piece of code that gets publi…

The MIT license isn't the only thing Actix wrote. They also wrote this: https://actix.rs/community/ > Community: The best things in life are to be shared > Join us - Want to talk to others about questions? The actix gitter channel or reddit community are your best starting point. > If you think you found a bug it's best to go to the github directly. There are two repositories that you might want to report against. ac…

True, they did write that. But taking into consideration the license open source and free software is usually licensed under, they are free that change those opinions at any time, and you cannot blame them for it.

If you had a contract with the project, I would understand the frustration. But since it's published on a "NO-WARRANTY" and no promises basis, the persons opinion can change at any time, and that's perfectly fine.

So maybe today I feel like, yeah, my open source project should have a community! So I publicly write that. But then 6 months later I change my mind and stop trying. This is also perfectly fine. Annoying, sure, but if you want to avoid that, start making contracts with the libraries that you include in your projects.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#375

Post by capableweb »

ztjio wrote: post #328
capableweb wrote: post #323

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO This is part of the MIT license. Many other open source and free software licenses contain the same thing. It's simple, people provide software they write in their free time or "sponsored" by their company, in return they get nothing and you should expect nothing more than the piece of code that gets publi…

I'm on board with your general message, however, the larger actix isn't some independent project. It is clearly endeavored to build and serve a community. And maybe that wasn't the intent of the author/maintainer? I don't know. But I'm going to tell you right now that if you don't want to be part of a community (for better and worse) the best plan is to not join one, especially not one that proselytizes itself in a w…

> But I'm going to tell you right now that if you don't want to be part of a community (for better and worse) the best plan is to not join one

Well, you can want to be a part of a community one month, and not the other month, which is fine. We have other stuff going on in our lives too.

> It's perfectly fine to build a project in the open and license it openly and not accept open participation.

It's also perfectly fine to build a project in the open, license it openly and try to push for open participation, but later change your mind and not do that anymore. As mentioned, open source comes with no guarantees, what so ever. Let's keep it that way.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#376

Post by AzzieElbab »

ww520 wrote: post #344
AzzieElbab wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

would you have declined a patch that fixes a real problem because it is boring? i do not really get that kind of thinking either. personally i would have accepted it and replaced with something clever latter on

Yes, I would. Because that patch is a "style" patch. It's not important in the author's roadmap for the project. People ask for different things and think their things are the most important, and when they don't get their way, screaming and kicking to force them in. They can always fork it or create a separate project if it's so important.

I wrote "fixes a problem" explicitly. How is that a "style" patch?

Re: Actix project postmortem

#377

Post by lonelappde »

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…

Yeah, people who aren't in perfect running form don't deserve help.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#378

Post by detuur »

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.

Sort of ironic that the entire commotion started when the Actix maintainer dismissed a contributor's code as boring after they wrote a POC and a patch for a use-after-free bug.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#379

Post by KirinDave »

undecisive wrote: post #331
KirinDave wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So uh, I gotta be honest with you: I can barely follow your post. It makes very little sense to me. But the parts I can figure out, I disagree strongly with.

> 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"

The flaw with this is that just running code in production for a modest amout of time proves nothing. That is in fact the opposite of proof, it's an anecdote. Safe code from a sound compiler can be literally proven to hold certain properties, with a margin of certainty that depends on then compiler.

Now of course, the proof guarantees of the specific code in question are weak compared to what you can do with something like Liquid Haskell or Idris or Coq, but they're definitely more than this pride-based programming you're holding up.

> Maybe your code has introduced a complex interaction that none of my examples exploit, but other people's examples blow up because of it.

And maybe your code already had that. That's why I trust compiler checks a hell of a lot more than people. And that's why I find this entire movement of pride-based programming that you and the subject of this thread so problematic. You're just holding up your haphazard experience as evidence. And honestly, not many people's experience would move me that way. Maybe if you're running it as Google or Facebook's frontend I'd find that reassuring, but short of that...? No.

Have you load tested your software? How did you simulate it? Have you validated your algorithm with a tool like TLA+? Have you watched your memory use carefully? Have you measured the latency variance? Under what kinds of loads? Is your data real or a projection using something like USL4J?

> 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.

Pull requests on GitHub are generally the click of a button. If they're not good on grounds of completeness, then reject them on those grounds. Not, "Oh here we go again this code is so much more mechanically verified than mine, don't start this again."

Re: Actix project postmortem

#380

Post by geofft »

capableweb wrote: post #374
geofft wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The MIT license isn't the only thing Actix wrote. They also wrote this: https://actix.rs/community/ > Community: The best things in life are to be shared > Join us - Want to talk to others about questions? The actix gitter channel or reddit community are your best starting point. > If you think you found a bug it's best to go to the github directly. There are two repositories that you might want to report against. ac…

True, they did write that. But taking into consideration the license open source and free software is usually licensed under, they are free that change those opinions at any time, and you cannot blame them for it. If you had a contract with the project, I would understand the frustration. But since it's published on a "NO-WARRANTY" and no promises basis, the persons opinion can change at any time, and that's perfectl…

I'd like to live in a world where, if I tell you something, you can take my word for it and you don't demand a contract for it.

Also, those words are still on the website. If the author is no longer interested in bug reports - which is absolutely the author's right, to be clear, and does not make them a bad person - they ought to at least change the language on the website to make it clear. Otherwise the language encourages people to waste their time, which is pretty rude.

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