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

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

#231

Post by siraben »

Nixpkgs contributor here. One of the misunderstandings by frenck is how Nix operates[0], which is not via mutable site-packages folders but more accurately as an immutable graph structure. What this means is that to have home-assistant packaged properly, we need to also package its dependencies, which includes ambee.

The argument that "In that case you are shipping an broken Home Assistant version."[1] is incorrect, since we also enable tests[2], when possible, on Python packages to ensure they are packaged correctly.

[0] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/126326#issuecomment-86...

[1] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/126326#issuecomment-86...

[2] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/821b34edaf9911481ad4dd...

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

#232

Post by ticviking »

geofft wrote: post #19
arthurcolle wrote: post #11

Can someone elucidate why he is so against "his" code being used in this project?

> If users experiencing issues with the ambee library in this package, they will knock on my door. And I'm not willing to support that or accept that burden. Especially as I don't see a good repacking reason in this case. Users will contact the author for support, but users are getting the software indirectly via a packager, which means a) there might be changes from the packager b) they might be getting an older ver…

This is the case with literally every piece of software packaged for linux, it seems that nix is just the first place to attempt to package this. The project looks to only be a week old anyhow.

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

#233

Post by danpalmer »

pierrebai wrote: post #100
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…

IMO, it's worse than that: frenk does seem to understand the history of FOSS distribution. Most Linux distributions included packaged sources for the software. This is no different. They did not point back to the original repo, not to the source control repo. They had rmps or the equivalent. The existence of pypi does not mean everyone is forced to link back to it and use it has their own source repo. Frenk insistanc…

He strikes me as someone who has been burnt by the packaging issues that have been around in the ecosystem for years.

You're right that the existence of PyPI doesn't mean everyone is forced to link back to it, but damn it would make a lot of stuff a hell of a lot easier if it did. I've been bitten by Debian packages being years out of date, I've seen packages modified by maintainers in ways that are poorly documented and useful for Debian users rather than Python ecosystem participants.

I've managed to work my way out of that now and would never go back to that world if I can help it as the trade of reduced engineering quality (along various axes) for increased "freedom" is not one that I value (personally, or at work). So I can really empathise with this persons position.

I think they handled it poorly, communicated poorly, came to the wrong conclusions, and left the discussion in a bad place, but all of that just screams frustration to me, and I can understand where it comes from.

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

#234

Post by danhor »

meepmorp wrote: post #226
lucideer wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that thread is wild. If the views in that discussion are generally representative of the perspective of a majority of homeassistant maintainers & stewards, I'd be extremely wary of relying on the software long term. > Just do as he asks This is the absolute antithesis of the intent of open source. What an awful community response.

> What an awful community response. You're expecting an entirely unrelated community of users to be invested in the goals and interests of NixOS. They're not, and perhaps they see Frenk's point in a way that people that aren't part of their community do not.

What Frenk is effectively saying is that he doesn't want his packages redistributed by distros. Since this is a dependency of home assistant, this means home assistant (as the whole package) can't be distributed if his wishes are respected.

Additionally Frenk didn't react to any proposal to still distribute home assistant and it's dependencies while respecting his wishes. This seems like a pretty clear-cut case of involving the upstream community, to make sure they're aware and ok with their dependencies trying to block distribution or to change something if that's not the case.

The whole saga left me rethinking my home assistant usage, since it seems like this could become a larger issue with other distribution mechanism not sanctioned by upstream.

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

#235

Post by totony »

meepmorp wrote: post #226
lucideer wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that thread is wild. If the views in that discussion are generally representative of the perspective of a majority of homeassistant maintainers & stewards, I'd be extremely wary of relying on the software long term. > Just do as he asks This is the absolute antithesis of the intent of open source. What an awful community response.

> What an awful community response. You're expecting an entirely unrelated community of users to be invested in the goals and interests of NixOS. They're not, and perhaps they see Frenk's point in a way that people that aren't part of their community do not.

Arguably the home assistant community is fragmented. What if Debian policy or whatever distro they use is targeted next?

IMO there was no discussion in that thread just "remove from no" "we can't do that" repeat

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

#237

Post by danpalmer »

soraminazuki wrote: post #194
dwelch wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. This is kind of bizarre behavior from someone who is such an important contributor to Home Assistant, a large scale open source platform. I can’t imagine most of the leaders in Home Assistant would share this attitude, but maybe I’m wrong.

Unfortunately, the founder of Home Assistant has acted similarly too. When NixOS maintainers raised concerns, he accused them of having "no intention to contribute anything positively." This was despite NixOS maintainers' best efforts to engage in a civil discussion. To make matters worse, he even used the fact that the NixOS discussion was temporarily locked down due to high tensions and accused NixOS maintainers of…

It seems like HA has its own plugin distribution model, whereas NixOS is trying to work around that to provide reproducible builds.

Aside from how this issue has been handled, poorly, that seems like a reasonable technical decision for HA to make, particularly given that their main use case is semi-technical user installing on a Raspberry Pi, and in that case is it something they should be forced to support? A fork seems like the right option there?

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

#238

Post by thebestmoshe »

yongjik wrote: post #143

Am I missing something, or is the project in question literally just one week old? https://pypi.org/project/ambee/#history https://github.com/frenck/python-ambee/commits/main

It was just added to Home Assistant, which is why it was being added to `nixpkgs` now.

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

#240

Post by aequitas »

ticviking wrote: post #228
yongjik wrote: post #143

Am I missing something, or is the project in question literally just one week old? https://pypi.org/project/ambee/#history https://github.com/frenck/python-ambee/commits/main

If the response to someone finding and using your work is the kind of over the top demand to "don't use the thing I just released under a permissive license" with multiple replies that amount to, "Don't use the thing in a way I don't like kthanxbai" how can you depend on it?

The project is written specifically for Home assistant by a core developer, it's not a small time developer who's project got accidentally included in a major project.
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