Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

“Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 363 posts

Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”

#171

Post by lucideer »

kissgyorgy wrote: post #42

If you don't understand the authors frustration, read Daniel Stenberg blog about what kind of requests he gets about curl. It's insane and ridiculous, not everybody is capable of/wanting to deal with all kinds of shit and hostile users like Daniel.

That's entirely reasonable if it's happened/happening to you AND you have no means to stop it from continuing.

In this case it clearly hasn't happened to this author (yet) AND the nixos devs have put forward a selection of reasonable proposals to prevent it happening to him. All of which he has rejected without and real justification.

If you read the full thread it becomes clear that his citing fear of support burden is not made in good faith. His acts of blocking redistribution of his package in any Linux distro (here & Fedora at least) is clearly a bigger burden for him to take on than he would take on if he allowed the redistributions.

Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”

#172

Post by jonringer117 »

Related context:

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/126319

In response to "not having the latest": Generally we (nixpkgs) lag behind a bit, as managing ~60-100k packages takes some time. But as long as the process to build a package hasn't changed, we will have a bot which automatically attempts to update packages based on metadata from pypi, github, and repology.

Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”

#174

Post by aequitas »

Denvercoder9 wrote: post #116
63 wrote: post #21

Is there greater context here that helps explain what's going on? Reading the comments in the thread didn't clarify much for me as someone unfamiliar with NixOS, their apparently unique Python packaging scheme, and Home Assistant.

I think the greater context is that the Home Assistant developers are somewhat hostile to people running, and especially packaging, their software outside of their own supported methods (which are Docker containers or their own full OS). It's somewhat understandable as it creates a support burden for them, but especially given the enthusiast nature of the community this doesn't seem like a smart decision. There's bee…

> I think the greater context is that the Home Assistant developers are somewhat hostile to people running, and especially packaging, their software outside of their own supported methods..

The person proposing the Nix package is a Home assistant developer afaik, so that would be weird.

Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”

#175

Post by CJefferson »

miloignis wrote: post #102
CJefferson wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the alternatives were something like "rename, so it isn't attached to them any more". I understand their issues, at present they can push new releases via pip, with this many nix users could have very out of date packages.

If I understand you, they offered that very thing in https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/126326#issuecomment-86... and it first wasn't answered, and then was dismissed with "This was already answered. Please don't repack my source in this repository was my request. I don't see how your suggestion is changing that." That response was what confused me as to the problem with packaging the library, as it seems like tha…

I missed that bit, thanks. I find it weird they seemed to suggest they would also consider reimplementing the whole package, with the same API.

Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”

#176

Post by numo16 »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #154
numo16 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would only remove the burden if users of the NixOS package know to go to the fork for support, as opposed to the upstream.

How would they even know to ask upstream for support, rather than the fork? If you use package bar and have a problem, you would have to do a lot of digging to even find original progject foo and ask them for help (which wouldn't even make sense since it's a separate thing)

I guess that depends on how users go about finding projects on github to file issues. If, for example, the user has an issue with this NixOS package (or debian package/any other repackaged example), and they start by just searching "python ambee github" or "Home Assistant ambee github" (seems like a reasonable first attempt to me) they will likely find the upstream near the top of the results.

Now, some users will perform due diligence and maybe find the NixOS issue referenced in OP and look elsewhere, but many will find the project and immediately file an issue there in the upstream, leading to the author's main concern of "I don't have time to support NixOS issues".

Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”

#177

Post by lucideer »

blowski wrote: post #37

I don’t really understand the details here. Seems like they disagree about the ease of avoiding it being repacked. Perhaps a good compromise would be for them to collaborate on a solution they’re both happy with. As it is, this conversation looks like: “can you not pls” “too difficult” “no it isn’t” “yes it is” ad infinitum.

> a good compromise would be for them to collaborate

If you read through the thread, the author makes it extremely clear that he has zero interest in collaborating or coming to any kind of mutually agreeable solution.

Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”

#178

Post by jamincan »

robotresearcher wrote: post #104
nailer wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He doesn’t understand the letter of OSS either. Limiting who can distribute a project means it no longer meets the Open Source Definition and is therefore not OSS.

No, he acknowledges explicitly early in the thread that the license allows the code to be redistributed with or without his approval.

He later says he will relicense it so only specific projects can use his code. I think that would likely invalidate their own licenses, so I'm not sure how that would work.

Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”

#179

Post by Spivak »

elmerfud wrote: post #8

Seems like an author that doesn't understand the spirit of FOSS. The nixos team was clearly allowed to use it and include it when asking for some technical merits as to why, and even offering many alternative options to appease the author the author seemed to just childishly stamp their feet and say, "because I said so". Eventually the author took the position of "taking my ball and going home". Why is a person like…

I think there’s some emotional nuance here. After a certain point he basically said all of his technical justification and the request does boil down to “because I said so and I’m the author.” The Nix maintainers explicitly do not want to respect the author’s wishes (which is fine) but that makes the whole thing turn adversarial because “okay we won’t include it” wasn’t even something the maintainers considered for even a second. It was pretty level headed discussion until it was clear that their only motivation was getting to yes or enough justification to ignore him.

Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”

#180

Post by SuperSandro2000 »

ww520 wrote: post #129
Macha wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like Home Assistant by default pulls the (EDIT: Home assistant specified, not latest) version of the package from PyPI at runtime and loads it dynamically. The point of NixOS is reproducible builds, that is if you build a given nix environment you will always get the same code. Dynamically pulling from PyPI at runtime defeats that. The author doesn't want any way of downloading the code other than getting "…

This sounds like NixOS is not ready to handle this scenario and they are bulldozing the issue to get it included.

NixOS is quite ready to handle home-assistant but did not yet package every python package that it could depend on. That is just taking a bit more time and will be eventually done. Until then you should take a quick look at your logs if something is broken/not working and you should easily find which package is missing. If you need help with that you can always jump on the NixOS matrix channel and people will help you with that.
Post reply on HN