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Rust maintainer perfectionism, or, the tragedy of Alacritty (2020)

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Re: Rust maintainer perfectionism, or, the tragedy of Alacritty (2020)

#191

Post by DannyBee »

Etheryte wrote: post #185
DannyBee wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"As an open source author and maintainer, I think you're looking at this from the wrong way around. Good contributions are not the norm, they're the exception, " I've contributed to hundreds of projects, and maintained a ton, so i feel this pain, so please take what i say in that vein :) The question i usually ask when i see this is: "What is the thing you did that you think should have caused people's behavior to ch…

My personal and very subjective opinion is that it's not my hill to die on. The majority of most things is not good, books, music, business plans, you name it. Open source contributions are the same — and that's okay. Much like I don't have a problem with people who write books I personally don't like, I don't take issue with people whose contributions don't align with what I think is good. I try to focus my energy o…

I think that's a fine viewpoint, and one i take with many projects, and try to be clear upfront - IE "this is a thing i'm not going to spend a lot of energy on. If you give me stuff that works well, i'll integrate it. If not, i won't".

I would also agree you are going to get some amount of crap no matter what. But, i would say if you want this to be different, it's not entirely on other people. Even with the best of intent, you can't expect contributors or teams or processes to behave magically just because they should. You usually need to motivate/incentivize or train the behaviors you want, and iterate the processes and your approach until you are getting what you want.

Re: Rust maintainer perfectionism, or, the tragedy of Alacritty (2020)

#192

Post by klelatti »

entropicdrifter wrote: post #176
klelatti wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well they could have said 'Most PRs are bug ridden garbage' - stronger than I would use but fair enough. But no, it's a comment on the characteristics of people contributing to projects. It's saying that they are not capable of making a quality contribution.

It's saying they are not capable of making a quality contribution without criticism/review . Your reply here is some serious pedantry, you're essentially arguing that the output of most programmers is totally disconnected from the abilities of most programmers. Really , what other relevant external indicators of the abilities of a given programmer does anyone have access to besides the code they output?

1. Your PR is bug ridden garbage.

2. You don't have the patience, skills or experience to write anything other than bug ridden garbage.

Not pedantry at all so see a big distinction between these two statements.

In fact almost a textbook study of how to / how not to give feedback.

Re: Rust maintainer perfectionism, or, the tragedy of Alacritty (2020)

#193

Post by scns »

tomxor wrote: post #136
Etheryte wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an open source author and maintainer, I think you're looking at this from the wrong way around. Good contributions are not the norm, they're the exception, and from the offset it's often not so straightforward to figure out which one you're dealing with. It isn't constructive to think of a contribution as a gift, if anything, it's a Greek gift [0]: contributing to an open source project creates more work for the m…

A lot of disgruntled contributors also forget that beyond code quality, projects have opinions, and their PRs opinions may be incompatible... We need to be grateful even when maintainers disagree with us, because opinion soup makes for bloated, unfocused, buggy, crappy software. Perhaps this part explains all the commotion around rust... being a popular new language with strong opinions, but today there is a lot of e…

> but today there is a lot of entitlement going on in software communities

I'd generalise it: There is a lot of entitlement going on right now.

Re: Rust maintainer perfectionism, or, the tragedy of Alacritty (2020)

#194

Post by ReleaseCandidat »

purple_turtle wrote: post #148
ReleaseCandidat wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Take a look on LKML, or Git's mailing list, or on any serious project from the last 20 years. Yes. But we are talking about a terminal emulator. And not even about one bundled with a DE (or OS). This _should_ be exactly the type of project where people can get their first OSS programming experience.

> This _should_ be exactly the type of project where people can get their first OSS programming experience. It is 100% up to maintainer of a given project, they are not obligated to do this. People are 100% free to pursue sky-high reliability and bugfreeness in their project, no matter what it is.

> People are 100% free to pursue sky-high reliability and bugfreeness in their project, no matter what it is.

Of course they are. But they should not complain that the only people interested in their project are, well, not super-star programmers but beginners.

In other words: they can wait for the other programmer who is almost ;) as perfect as they are. But chances are these people are not interested in the 4535th copy of $TOOL (if they were, they would probably write that themselves - that's why there existed 4534 versions of $TOOL).

Re: Rust maintainer perfectionism, or, the tragedy of Alacritty (2020)

#195

Post by chucksmash »

klelatti wrote: post #63
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #39

> So, here we are in 2020, and nix#864 remains unmerged. Fred, you say, you overreact. I read the entire PR. I _want_ to agree with the author, but I didn't find this reasonable. The feedback, for the most part, was not about being perfectionism. Not remotely. It's about being correct . This is not unique to Rust, which as a language spends a lot of time being correct in a few dimensions, but pretty traditional. You…

> The fact is that most programmers do not have the patience, skill or experience to write half-decent code that isn't bug-ridden garbage. Whether or not you are right on this issue is this really the way to generalise about current / potential contributors? Why would anyone even attempt to contribute if their efforts are likely to be dismissed in this way? Edit: I’m making no point about quality or otherwise of cont…

> Why would anyone even attempt to contribute if their efforts are likely to be dismissed in this way?

Because they are adults with enough emotional maturity to not require constant encouragement in every aspect of life.

It's one thing to make negative, targeted statements against an individual contributor. It's another to make a likely true, slightly negative outlook about the quality of contributions on average. Potential contributors should be responsible for maintaining their own emotional equilibrium in such a case, in my opinion.

Re: Rust maintainer perfectionism, or, the tragedy of Alacritty (2020)

#196

Post by K0nserv »

antihero wrote: post #51

Ha, trying to get Alacritty to have a native-feel icon for macOS which had basically zero drawbacks and most other applications do was met with a straight up NOPE. Not up for debate, people supplied the assets and I even made a PR, nope, closed. Even though it was in a directory full of platform specific stuff (Alacritty.app resources), it was decided that it couldn't differ from the other icons, so Alacritty has to…

There's a similar thing with Kitty, which has a pretty bad looking icon that has sentimental value for the maintainer. The maintainer has expressed that they have no interest in changing the icon.

I simply made my own[0] and replaced it on my machine, easy enough and I fully respect the maintainer's position. It takes 30 seconds to replace the icon with an alternative, in fact you can probably automate it if you wish.

0: https://github.com/k0nserv/kitty-icon

Re: Rust maintainer perfectionism, or, the tragedy of Alacritty (2020)

#197

Post by the_gipsy »

Macha wrote: post #172
the_gipsy wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many other non-apple apps “stick out like a sore thumb”?

On my dock: Finder, Slack: Squircle Chrome, VS Code: Logo in a white squircle Alacritty, IntelliJ, Firefox, Obsidian: Unusual shaped logos VPN: Circle Webex: Squircle, but scaled wrong (different border radius and aspect ratio) So only about half are squircles, and one of them is not the OS X squircle.

Exactly, so mostly only Apple apps have been redesigned.

Re: Rust maintainer perfectionism, or, the tragedy of Alacritty (2020)

#198

Post by OJFord »

klelatti wrote: post #192
entropicdrifter wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's saying they are not capable of making a quality contribution without criticism/review . Your reply here is some serious pedantry, you're essentially arguing that the output of most programmers is totally disconnected from the abilities of most programmers. Really , what other relevant external indicators of the abilities of a given programmer does anyone have access to besides the code they output?

1. Your PR is bug ridden garbage. 2. You don't have the patience, skills or experience to write anything other than bug ridden garbage. Not pedantry at all so see a big distinction between these two statements. In fact almost a textbook study of how to / how not to give feedback.

Those are both hypothetical statements directed at an author, which nobody here has done or advocated doing.

And regarding 2, the original was a general statement about the existence and prevalence of (low) skill; not an indictment against any specific author of 'garbage' who may (or may not) be capable of better.

Re: Rust maintainer perfectionism, or, the tragedy of Alacritty (2020)

#200

Post by indymike »

rtfeldman wrote: post #28

Posts like this are major contributors to maintainer burnout. Whatever value they have as a signal boost is a rounding error compared to the harm they cause to individuals as well as to the culture as a whole. Please don't ever post things like this. If you're this frustrated that the people who make free things for you aren't donating their time to you in the way you'd prefer, grab a drink with a friend and vent to…

> Posts like this are major contributors to maintainer burnout.

Lack of contributors also causes maintainer burnout. The best way I know to have zero help is to treat a contributor poorly. Sometimes it cannot be helped, for example, when a contributor sends unusable code or a contribution forces a decision the maintainer isn't ready to make. Most scorned contributors will do exactly what Frederick did in this case, vent and then find a similar project to contribute to. In this case the similar project is Kitty, which is a fantastic piece of software.

> Please don't ever post things like this.

Asking people to shut up, not matter how politely you do it, rarely works. The problem will remain, and people will still complain about it.

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