As the author of shitty open source libraries I agree, but a bit of a disclaimer in the readme should be expected.
Having PR-Material in ReadMe.md is the source of success, cause everyone who tries, is a free-contributor until it works.
It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)
331–340 of 364 posts
Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Kids make you happy, but only when they move out as as long as they don’t break the bank. Truth is having kids is a kiss of death for your creative and professional career. E: Of course downvotes. Truth hurts. Let’s see how grey my comment gets.
Only if you care personally for the kids. Pick up a history book, filled with famous persons who had lot's of kids, but they were raised by family and staff.
Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
off-topic: I still don't understand the use case that left-pad solved. I'm not into js at all but why do you need a dependency to add space to text? I'm asking honestly, I just don't get what the use for this was.
> I'm not into js at all Programming in JS is just this way. I had to include moment.js yesterday just to format a date. Nothing fancy, but no easy way around it.
You did not have to, moment.js is just a wrapper around the dozens of inbuilt functions provided by the Date object.
Why could you not have used Date.toLocaleDateString() or Date.toDateString() or Date.toISOSting() or any other of the inbuilt functions outlined here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)
#334Earlier 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.
I don't have any use for it either, but this package is not important by itself. It happens that this package is (was) at the very bottom of the dependency chain for some huge packages (like Babel, Webpack, popular frameworks, ...).
When its creator removed it, they literally destroyed the foundation of those popular packages. That's what made it suddenly important.
Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
If you're having kids you're striving for things that aren't happiness. Often trading exhaustion for purpose and meaning.
If you want kids and you have kids it certainly looks like you are striving for happiness.
Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's fine to not have time to maintain code you open source. However, if your library ends up gaining a significant user base and you don't have time to maintain it, then I think you have a duty to either: 1. Allow others to step in as maintainers and review/approve new features and bug fixes in your stead. or (if you want to maintain control of your library) 2. Be clear that your library is in maintenance mo…
I really disagree that authors have a general obligation to do anything with their code, at least as far as support is concerned. If somebody signed up formally to be a committer or made some other explicit commitment that's of course a different matter. If there's an implicit obligation, it seems to me it's on users, not authors. If you really need something changed you should fork/fix it yourself or talk somebody e…
Licenses do not codify obligations, they codify legal requirements. Getting someone to replace you if like holding the door open after yourself: no law will force you to do this, but people will still say it’s polite for you to do so.
Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are simply being pedantic. He said there's no "absolute" obligation, but there are some by virtue of us living in a society.
I’m not saying this to be pedantic. And I’m not denying that there is some social expectations when living in society. If you say that there is no obligations, but also that you should follow some social expectations, then you’re contradicting yourself. It’s just a nicer way to say that people should behave according to what you consider to be acceptable. Btw, which society rules do you mean? Because you have a lot o…
Ok, so the problem here is that “obligation” has two meanings, and they’re being conflated here. One is pretty close to “being courteous to others” and the other is “you must do this”. When people say “maintainers have no obligation to anyone”, the point to the license where it usually says something like “THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED AS-IS WITH NO WARRANTY” and you can tell that it’s the legal “must” definition because it’s in all caps and written in a way that nobody actually would write. So that means that nobody can sue the maintainer when they don’t do something or the other. All good, right? Well, now the question being posed above is “does this mean that the maintainer can also be rid of their obligations in the sense of courtesy, not legality?” And now since there is a difference in the definitions it is not contradictory to want to say “yes” to the second question. And yes, you are correct to say that these differ based on circumstances and location: that’s OK, we don’t judge them in a court of law. We do, however, judge people for their failings to meet societal obligations, based on our personal judgements.
Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, there is no obligation. But there’s a thing called courtesy. And as humans there are certain social norms. If someone spams me, I will ignore or retaliate by reporting as spam. If someone sends a low effort question, I might politely tell them to rtfm. If someone makes an effort to articulate a problem, even if I disagree, I’ll try to give them a reasoned response. And if I genuinely have no interest in any inter…
> No, there is no obligation. But there’s a thing called courtesy. And as humans there are certain social norms. In my experience, there are no objective social norms or definition of "courtesy". What's polite in one culture might not be in another. Projecting your own values onto others isn't helpful.
Most cultures share some general social norms, such as courtesy to others. I would say it’s actually more unhelpful to dismiss norms entirely just because they have variance.
Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is naive. If it's a bad library full of bugs, it's going to be garbage code. I'm not going to spend inordinate amounts of time & effort wrestling with shitty code to earn the right to say the library is bad. IMO that's not a good standard.
I wasn't saying you couldn't call it bad. But I will say demanding it not be bad would be stepping over a line. If money ever changes hands with the author of that code, that's a different story. But if it's something free you just found, and you have never paid the author anything, then at most you can warn others to not waste their time. You are in no moral or legal position to demand anything.
You're right, I misread. I apologise.
Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree it's an audience problem. I had a Wordpress plugin up and I'd get all sorts of entitled requests, borderline "plz fix my website you broke it". But also had some C libraries for Arm STM32 and only ever got solid pull requests and people eager to help. You see the same thing in IRC / Discord channels of those technologies.
At the risk of stereotyping a bit here (from personal experience), Wordpress users tend to be a lot less technical than C programmers, and I find the less technical the audience, the more entitled they tend to be. My theory is that because they don't sling code themselves, they just don't understand how much work and effort goes in to making good software. Because they don't understand it, they tend to not appreciate…
I’m not sure it’s quite this simple. I maintain a popular video player and as such many of our users are nontechnical but some are more familiar with some of the options that are offered than I am myself. Whether someone is entitled really depends on…whether they’re just entitled in general, I think. I get people saying that we should “just add complicated xyz feature” who clearly don’t know the complexity involved, but then people with just as much experience leave issues like “I love your software so much but it is crashing every time I launch it (actually a one line fix, which they don’t know), can you please take a look at this, I’d really appreciate it” which is like the perfect issue. On the other hand I get technical issues with people filing pull requests to fix them but then sometimes I need to say something they won’t like such as “we don’t want this feature” or “we can’t work on this” and I’ll get a range of responses there too.