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

I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know

jakewins.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 106 posts

Re: I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know

#21

Post by pix64 »

nailer wrote: post #4

Same thing happened to me: I wrote the module that does Microsoft Office files in Python. At the time, the solutions for doing it in Python were 'talk to some Java library' or 'talk to some .net library'. I read the openxml spec and made something which did basic creation, extracting text, modifying docs. I totally didn't have time to maintain it, then Scanny took over. It's now hugely popular, the code handles non-W…

I seriously just used this a couple weeks ago. Was thinking about implementing some more features as I had to drop down to manually editing the XML.

Re: I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know

#22

Post by feross »

watson wrote: post #3

This concept awesome and already have a name. It's called Open Open Source: http://openopensource.org It's especially essential when managing a high volume of open source projects on GitHub.

Yes! Rod Vagg (technical chair of Node.js) is one of the pioneers of this way of developing software. He was recently on the podcast "Request For Commits" discussing this very topic!

Liberal Contribution and Governance Models https://changelog.com/rfc-7/

Re: I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know

#23

Post by mark_l_watson »

Great story. My similar experience was in the mid 1990s. I had written a tool call PicWeb Viewer that would recursively walk directories and subdirectories containing photos, create thumbnail images, and generate simple HTML to navigate everything. My code was so simple but worked fine. I released the source code and over the next few years several people contributed modifications that made my simple bit of code awesome.

Re: I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know

#24

Post by chris_wot »

I have an EMF+ library I started the barebones of in LibreOffice. [1]

Largely due to my depression and desperate need to get a job, I never got much past an initial read of the EMF+ files, but I'd love to see someone take my branch on git, split it into its own library and then work with someone to integrate it into the Drawing Layer. [2]

1. https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?h=priv...

2. https://people.freedesktop.org/~thorsten/talks/fosdem_2014_s...

Re: I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know

#25

Post by chris_wot »

mjs7231 wrote: post #14

Ha, Same thing happened to me with the SAME contributor!! Benjamin Bach is an awesome dude. He helped me maintain django-dbbackup for quite some time then we found a third contributor, Anthony Monthe, who is also very interested in the project and I would say owns it now. It's been maintained by those two for quite some time now. I wish there was a way for me to buy them both a bunch of rounds of beer. :D

If that guy was paid in liquor by everyone who benefited from his contributions, he'd develop cirrhosis.

Re: I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know

#26

Post by daurnimator »

I did the same thing..... and then the contributor took contributions from others that added security holes, removed cross platform support, and had what I consider to be low code quality. I've now disowned that project.

Therefore, I'm extremely hesitant to hand out "commit bit"s again. To make up for it I try and review PRs the day of submission; even then I don't get a lot of contributions.

There seems to be a inherent trade off between security+quality and how welcoming you are to new contributors.

On the other hand, I have taken over maintainership for some projects; but it was after months of steady contributions.

Re: I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know

#27

Post by ashitlerferad »

mjs7231 wrote: post #14

Ha, Same thing happened to me with the SAME contributor!! Benjamin Bach is an awesome dude. He helped me maintain django-dbbackup for quite some time then we found a third contributor, Anthony Monthe, who is also very interested in the project and I would say owns it now. It's been maintained by those two for quite some time now. I wish there was a way for me to buy them both a bunch of rounds of beer. :D

Convince both of them to join you at a Django conference.

Re: I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know

#29

Post by mjs7231 »

tylersmith wrote: post #15
mjs7231 wrote: post #14

Ha, Same thing happened to me with the SAME contributor!! Benjamin Bach is an awesome dude. He helped me maintain django-dbbackup for quite some time then we found a third contributor, Anthony Monthe, who is also very interested in the project and I would say owns it now. It's been maintained by those two for quite some time now. I wish there was a way for me to buy them both a bunch of rounds of beer. :D

Use Bitcoin or Venmo. Sounds like they've been great stewards.

I tried Google Wallet before, but it wouldn't let me send money out of the country or something like that.

Re: I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know

#30

Post by justinclift »

DB Browser for SQLite (previously known as SQLite Browser) has a similar history:

http://sqlitebrowser.org

It was unmaintained on SourceForge for years. Some guys put the code on GitHub and started fixing its problems. I became involved after them (to help on the OSX side initially), then contacted the original author. He was happy to see some people continuing it's development, so he gave us admin on the SourceForge project. That let us cleanly redirect people to the new GitHub project, and it's been growing decently from there (~4,600 stars on GitHub, 3.5Mill+ downloads, etc).

Post reply on HN