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It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

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Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

#281

Post by zhoujianfu »

ssanders82 wrote: post #255
BurningFrog wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately, DINKs are hard to compete with professionally Sure, but people with kids win at life. Let the DINK make some extra money. You still have it better.

> people with kids win at life That's a pretty insulting statement for those of us who can't have / don't want children. It's not a competition. We've chosen different paths than you. Not worse, just different.

Agreed... I remember a study on “do kids make you happier” and their conclusion was “kids make you happier if you want kids”.. people who didn’t want kids but had them or wanted kids but couldn’t have them were sadder, but people who didn’t want kids and didn’t have them were just as happy. Which I guess makes sense... people are happy when they get what they want!

Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

#282

Post by zomglings »

vxNsr wrote: post #269
scambier wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally what it says: https://github.com/left-pad/left-pad/blob/master/index.js Now if you ask "but why?", ultra-small packages like this are popular in JS because of the lack of a standard lib. Lots of devs prefer to install a dependency for each one-liner utility rather than write them themselves. The only added value of those packages is that they're usually unit-tested against weird edge-cases that you might mi…

You're misunderstanding, what is the use-case of that specific package? like I've never found myself needing to pad text on the left, just trying to understand why this was such an important package.

Probably for command line tools that need to add some level of hierarchy into their output. You can add 1 to pad length and pass it to a subcomponent to display its output.

Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

#283

Post by BurningFrog »

ssanders82 wrote: post #255
BurningFrog wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately, DINKs are hard to compete with professionally Sure, but people with kids win at life. Let the DINK make some extra money. You still have it better.

> people with kids win at life That's a pretty insulting statement for those of us who can't have / don't want children. It's not a competition. We've chosen different paths than you. Not worse, just different.

Sure I could have rephrased it along the lines of "you have the invaluable blessing of children, and surely that's more important than a 15% pay rise?".

Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

#284

Post by catalogia »

sabas123 wrote: post #136
wolco wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"sure: it is totally their fault for deploying something without carefully reading your code to figure out that it was a bit shitty beforehand" Yes you must read and understand everything or have trust in the publisher. Relying on the package name is going to get you in trouble. Sounds like a great exploit opportunity.

What if I have no reasonable way of fully understanding the code nor being able to judge the author on their trustworthiness (even disregarding that this isn't constant). As a community we need to accept that the above mentioned DOES happen. Pretending otherwise only hurts us all.

There are many things short of reading the code in full you can do to lower the chances of this happening. A lot of half-assed libraries have obviously incomplete APIs that you can notice if you think about the interface provided and the nature of what the library claims to be doing. You can also look at repo activity; was it all coded in one week 8 years ago and never touched again? Does it have lots of outstanding issues?

Some things may slip through the cracks, but filtering out most of the chaff can be done without reading every line of source.

Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

#285

Post by freedomben »

franciscop wrote: post #248
growse wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course some people are low effort issuers, but some people put time and effort into opening an issue on a project. When the maintainer closes it without even taking 60 seconds to type a quick message why, it shows me that the maintainer is the entitled dick, not the user. So what you're saying is that if a person puts a lot of time and effort into opening an issue, they're entitled to a response? The maintainer…

When I see someone expects/demands something of me, I point them to the permissive MIT license. I am also a Spaniard living in Japan, so the concept of "social norms/expectations/etc" (whatever that even is) is totally meaningless to me. If you put some effort and need help with the project, I'll try my best to help you. If you come demanding free support for your project, I'll just close the issue saying this is not…

It sounds like you and I are in agreement then. This is the same way I manage my projects as well. I think this is the best way to handle it. It gives respect to others without accepting disrespect from them.

Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

#286

Post by ProZsolt »

enraged_camel wrote: post #109
saurik wrote: post #8

I agree: it is OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty. However, it also can simultaneously be not OK for you to publish it in a package directory with a generic name and a description talking about how awesome it is as a trap for other people to run into, and that is really the core problem: it isn't that you didn't spend an unreasonable amount of time and money to make a good product that no one paid for…

The way I look at it is that releasing an open-source library is like bringing a child into this world: its utmost well-being is your responsibility. If you don't have the bandwidth for that, don't publish it. And, if your circumstances change later, find another maintainer -- after all, you wouldn't just abandon your child on the street, would you?

It's not a child. It's a hammer. Somebody put it in the community shed so others can use it. If it breaks or somebody needs a nailgun, that's not their problem. I'm glad if somebody lent me their hammer so I don't have to buy one, even if it's not the best.

Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

#287

Post by dunkelheit »

watwut wrote: post #275
dunkelheit wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the time yes, but it is not so simple. There is a common resource that can be described as "attention of people who are looking for a library for X" and every time you publish a library for X you use up a bit of this resource. Most of the time this effect is small and more than offset by the value of your code, but it is not zero and overusing this common resource is a dick move. As an extreme example conside…

I find this standard ridiculous. We dont apply similar standards to blogs nor videos nor art - them being crappy is not "taking away our attention resource". Publishing them is not using someone elses attention. And I dont go around hating on eHow. I do expect google to put them down in ranking over time and I do structure my queries so that I dont hit them. Also, small one time open source project is not tweaking SE…

I acknowledge the difference, but it is quantitative, not qualitative.

> We dont apply similar standards to blogs nor videos nor art - them being crappy is not "taking away our attention resource".

That's because the attention cost was driven way down by awesome information retrieval systems that we have (google, etc.). But the cost is still there and it is a good idea to compare it against benefits. Again, this doesn't mean that you should not publish anything.

> Publishing them is not using someone elses attention.

If you publish anything, you expect it to be found by someone (otherwise, why publish at all?). Voila, you've used their attention.

> And I dont go around hating on eHow. I do expect google to put them down in ranking over time and I do structure my queries so that I dont hit them.

This just corroborates my point that the cost is real. In this case the cost is paid by google (they have to expend resources to fight SEO spam) and you (you have to reformulate your queries).

> Also, small one time open source project is not tweaking SEO like content farms. That comparison does not work either.

I'm afraid without concrete examples we are talking past each other. Of course a small-time project that is clearly marked as such is totally OK, but the original post by saurik mentioned squatting common names and overpromising on features, which is definitely into the SEO territory.

Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

#288

Post by wizzwizz4 »

chadlavi wrote: post #229
cellularmitosis wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At scale, how do you tell the difference between software which is finished vs software which is unmaintained?

"Finished software" is a myth.

I don't know… true seems pretty finished to me.

Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

#290

Post by saurik »

watwut wrote: post #275
dunkelheit wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the time yes, but it is not so simple. There is a common resource that can be described as "attention of people who are looking for a library for X" and every time you publish a library for X you use up a bit of this resource. Most of the time this effect is small and more than offset by the value of your code, but it is not zero and overusing this common resource is a dick move. As an extreme example conside…

I find this standard ridiculous. We dont apply similar standards to blogs nor videos nor art - them being crappy is not "taking away our attention resource". Publishing them is not using someone elses attention. And I dont go around hating on eHow. I do expect google to put them down in ranking over time and I do structure my queries so that I dont hit them. Also, small one time open source project is not tweaking SE…

Ah yes, I certainly have never seen anyone complain about the signal-to-noise level of low-quality blog posts and videos about topics where people are trying to learn about something like COVID-19... oh, wait ;P.

The reality is that when you publish your package someone else who is trying to get something done is going to use their package manager's search feature to look for like "jsonrpc" and find your half-assed for-personal-use-only jsonrpc library as one of the results; great... now, they have to look at your readme file, open issues, and maybe do some kind of code review to verify whether you are taking this seriously enough for them to rely on your package or not. Of course, a lot of times they aren't even skilled enough to do that analysis correctly as they are just getting into software development and that is hard to do. Worst case you end up higher in the search results than an actually-useful package because you sniped a name like "jsonrpc" or "jsonrpc-client".

This is then the point where (and I am not saying you yourself do this, but this is the developer I am most upset with, and this is as someone who long ago mostly gave up using anyone's packages and now mostly deals with this by being the "wet blanket" constantly trying to convince other people about how low quality some random package they shouldn't be using really is) if your readme file talks about how awesome your package is and has a bunch of past tense descriptions of things you didn't get around to finishing and never will--things you might not even accept patches for or feedback on because this was a project you did over the weekend and are now done with and you didn't really sign up to be an open source maintainer--you aren't just using other's attention, you are outright being a jerk and need to really ask yourself what you are doing by publishing your package in the first place :(.

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