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A plea for better open source etiquette

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Re: A plea for better open source etiquette

#21

Post by benilov »

jacobr wrote: post #18
JangoSteve wrote: post #14

I'm an open-source maintainer who doesn't always answer issues and pull-requests right away. It sucks, I'm trying to get better. I can understand the frustration, but these sort of posts (or pleas or whatever you want to call them) always lack any sort of acknowledgement of the possibility that some maintainer's life may be different than yours. > You could always have the courtesy to acknowledge the bug or PR I’ve s…

If the OP would consider becoming a maintainer of a project they contribute to, and then follow their own advice, they do have some warrant to their complaints, otherwise not so much, for the reasons you state. I got a substantial pull request to an open source project of mine [1] that I don't have much time for, and followed the "Pull Request Hack" [2] and made the committer a maintainer. My GitHub notifications for…

I've taken over the maintenance for a project a few months ago and have tried to stick as closely as I can to what I wrote about.

I've also used the pull request hack, it's a really good idea!

Re: A plea for better open source etiquette

#22

Post by benilov »

JangoSteve wrote: post #14

I'm an open-source maintainer who doesn't always answer issues and pull-requests right away. It sucks, I'm trying to get better. I can understand the frustration, but these sort of posts (or pleas or whatever you want to call them) always lack any sort of acknowledgement of the possibility that some maintainer's life may be different than yours. > You could always have the courtesy to acknowledge the bug or PR I’ve s…

> I even considered not submitting this comment, for fear of anyone misunderstanding or taking this the wrong way, and the inevitable "open source is a responsibility" responses.

I'm glad that you did, thank you for taking the time to respond.

> The thing is, you're actually implying more than you're saying. What you really mean is, "You could always have the courtesy to acknowledge the bug or PR I’ve submitted as soon as I submit it."

While I've definitely been guilty of impatience in the past, now I try to measure the response against some kind of "OSS time", which is a lot more forgiving. I appreciate that people are likely to be busy, or away with their kids in Hawaii for the past two weeks.

Having said that...

> The maintainer may just be really busy this month. Or maybe they've been really busy for 6 months.

I think one month is a bit long to have to wait for a response. 6 months: most certainly too long. In those cases, the "pull request hack" [1] may be the way forward.

[1] http://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html

Re: A plea for better open source etiquette

#24

Post by JangoSteve »

benilov wrote: post #22
JangoSteve wrote: post #14

I'm an open-source maintainer who doesn't always answer issues and pull-requests right away. It sucks, I'm trying to get better. I can understand the frustration, but these sort of posts (or pleas or whatever you want to call them) always lack any sort of acknowledgement of the possibility that some maintainer's life may be different than yours. > You could always have the courtesy to acknowledge the bug or PR I’ve s…

> I even considered not submitting this comment, for fear of anyone misunderstanding or taking this the wrong way, and the inevitable "open source is a responsibility" responses. I'm glad that you did, thank you for taking the time to respond. > The thing is, you're actually implying more than you're saying. What you really mean is, "You could always have the courtesy to acknowledge the bug or PR I’ve submitted as so…

> I think one month is a bit long to have to wait for a response.

You're certainly entitled to that opinion, but the amount of time that is "acceptable" is completely subjective and relative. Holding someone else to your own arbitrary standards of acceptability is exactly what I'm referring to when I say these sort of complaints usually ignore the possibility that someone else's life is different than one's own.

I can see how a month would seem like a long time, it used to seem like a long time for me too. But for someone running a company, someone with a crazy family life, someone maintaining several projects, someone getting married or divorced or having kids, someone buying a house or selling a house or moving, someone in school, someone having financial troubles, etc., etc.; a month can be a blink of an eye. You, of course, are welcome to your opinion. I try to avoid holding people for whom I know nothing about to my own arbitrary standards, and try to withhold indignation if they don't live up to them. I admit it takes effort; I often find myself doing exactly that. I just have to remind myself that I can't really know them to the extent that I know myself, and thus it's not always fair to expect that their situation lends itself to meeting my standards.

EDIT: All that being said, I think the pull request hack could be a potential solution. It does however bring its own potential problems. You're basically putting your reputation in someone else's hands, whom you don't know. Of course that may be preferable to what you're doing to your reputation by taking a long time to respond to requests. I'm certainly considering it for a couple projects.

Re: A plea for better open source etiquette

#25

Post by JangoSteve »

ScottBurson wrote: post #16
JangoSteve wrote: post #14

I'm an open-source maintainer who doesn't always answer issues and pull-requests right away. It sucks, I'm trying to get better. I can understand the frustration, but these sort of posts (or pleas or whatever you want to call them) always lack any sort of acknowledgement of the possibility that some maintainer's life may be different than yours. > You could always have the courtesy to acknowledge the bug or PR I’ve s…

I once got really pissed off when I submitted a patch to a project and got no response at all. I waited several days, but when I saw that the maintainers were responding to new threads on the mailing list -- not just to existing threads -- I got upset and wrote something intemperate. I'm not proud of that, and have no intention of doing it again, but I did and do think it's rude not to reply at all. "Thanks for the p…

> ...but I did and do think it's rude not to reply at all. "Thanks for the patch; don't know when I'll have time to look at it" is enough.

You're probably right. All I can say is, when you get 100-200 emails a day, every day (it doesn't stop), it's hard. That's not an excuse nor a justification. it's just a statement, an explanation at best.

Also understand that your expectation of a maintainer's response, however small or trivial, is at direct odds with the time they spend working at their day job, or spending time with their family, or relaxing. That's not to say open source maintainers don't enjoy building and maintaining open source projects. Most do (including me). It's just the recognition that maintaining open source projects comes at the expense of other things which they also enjoy.

In the same way that I believe you're justified in thinking a maintainer's non-response is rude, I believe a maintainer would be justified in thinking your expectation of them is also rude.

Re: A plea for better open source etiquette

#26

Post by benilov »

JangoSteve wrote: post #24
benilov wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I even considered not submitting this comment, for fear of anyone misunderstanding or taking this the wrong way, and the inevitable "open source is a responsibility" responses. I'm glad that you did, thank you for taking the time to respond. > The thing is, you're actually implying more than you're saying. What you really mean is, "You could always have the courtesy to acknowledge the bug or PR I’ve submitted as so…

> I think one month is a bit long to have to wait for a response. You're certainly entitled to that opinion, but the amount of time that is "acceptable" is completely subjective and relative. Holding someone else to your own arbitrary standards of acceptability is exactly what I'm referring to when I say these sort of complaints usually ignore the possibility that someone else's life is different than one's own. I ca…

> Holding someone else to your own arbitrary standards of acceptability is exactly what I'm referring to when I say these sort of complaints usually ignore the possibility that someone else's life is different than one's own.

I agree with the spirit with what you're saying, this is indeed all opinion.

I see it like this; if you're walking along and say "hi" to your neighbour, he doesn't have to say "hi" back, but it's nice, 'sall :)

Re: A plea for better open source etiquette

#27

Post by JangoSteve »

benilov wrote: post #26
JangoSteve wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think one month is a bit long to have to wait for a response. You're certainly entitled to that opinion, but the amount of time that is "acceptable" is completely subjective and relative. Holding someone else to your own arbitrary standards of acceptability is exactly what I'm referring to when I say these sort of complaints usually ignore the possibility that someone else's life is different than one's own. I ca…

> Holding someone else to your own arbitrary standards of acceptability is exactly what I'm referring to when I say these sort of complaints usually ignore the possibility that someone else's life is different than one's own. I agree with the spirit with what you're saying, this is indeed all opinion. I see it like this; if you're walking along and say "hi" to your neighbour, he doesn't have to say "hi" back, but it'…

I agree. I certainly don't feel like we're arguing, just adding more pieces to both sides of the puzzle.

I guess what I'm saying is, if the neighbor doesn't say "hi" back, it might be for reasons you haven't considered, and it might not be as simple as asking them to just say "hi" back.

Re: A plea for better open source etiquette

#28

Post by stormbrew »

An interesting pattern I've come across lately is a project where contributions are almost universally either rejected or rewritten (largely superficially) by the original author of the project. I think I dislike this far more than a lack of response, though I've experienced that as well.

Re: A plea for better open source etiquette

#29

Post by relix »

I once submitted a pull request to add a feature to a popular OSS library. It got several "thumbs up", was actually useful, didn't change the API and had test coverage. I put a lot of time into making it nice and clean, in my opinion a perfect pull request. Two years later they closed it with a comment saying one of the more senior contributors added code that did what my code did (except 2 years later) so mine wasn't necessary anymore. They never merged my changes.

Objectively I can say what they did was cold but logical in the end, since it incorporated the change better into how they saw the next version of the library and they can trust the more senior contributor more. Subjectively it really hurt. It was one of my first contributions to open source and it definitely unmotivated me to do any others. It was in limbo for 2 years until they finally implemented it in another way, instead of just accepting the pull request for now until they could change it.

I don't hold a grudge against the people involved since I've used their code a lot and am thankful for their indirect help using their libraries. It just felt shitty.

Re: A plea for better open source etiquette

#30

Post by relix »

stormbrew wrote: post #28

An interesting pattern I've come across lately is a project where contributions are almost universally either rejected or rewritten (largely superficially) by the original author of the project. I think I dislike this far more than a lack of response, though I've experienced that as well.

I've done this. Had a pull request from a contributor that added a feature, but in return changed the API of my library almost completely, didn't account for many, many edge cases and had a couple of bugs. When I was done I had rewritten it completely, but I still attributed the change to the original contributor. In the end, I'm pretty sure I invested more time in it than he did, but fair is fair imo.
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