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Do not ship work in progress: An open letter

dont-ship.it

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Re: Do not ship work in progress: An open letter

#41

Post by rob74 »

zdragnar wrote: post #35
srmrqaz wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always thought that the whole point of Manjaro was to be the "more stable" Arch linux, since it holds the rolling updates and releases them at once every month. Is that not right anymore?

I've been using Manjaro for quite awhile and have yet to have an issue with a broken update. YMMV I guess.

Yeah, but I can understand that the experience of the users (who generally don't see any issues) is different from the experience of the application maintainers (where the few users that do see issues report those issues).

Re: Do not ship work in progress: An open letter

#42

Post by hulitu »

Spivak wrote: post #18
kop316 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> start calling themselves "nightly" distros It's not a "nightly" distro, it's a "let's take patches that are unfinished, release them into the wild onto unsuspecting users, and let the upstream developers deal with it" distro.

Which, to be fair, is pretty much what all upstream developers have been asking for for years and years because getting bug reports for 50 different builds of 15 different versions of your software all with different disto provided patches is exhausting. The software that actually has good release hygiene pales into comparison to the software that is actually more stable by just pulling from main.

> Which, to be fair, is pretty much what all upstream developers have been asking for for years and years because getting bug reports for 50 different builds of 15 different versions of your software all with different disto provided patches is exhausting.

Then don't do 15 different versions of your software. I ask again: Why do i need GTK1, 2, 3 and 4 on my system ? Why KDE 5 is not compatible with KDE4 ?

Re: Do not ship work in progress: An open letter

#43

Post by sillystuff »

rob74 wrote: post #6
kop316 wrote: post #4

For some additional context: https://blog.brixit.nl/why-i-left-pine64/ Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32494659 > Supporting Manjaro has historically done very little to facilitate the development of the software stack which is necessary for these devices [Pinephone/Pinephone Pro] to work. In some cases the Manjaro involvement actually causes extra workload for the developers by shipping known broken v…

So distros like Manjaro should stop calling themselves "rolling release" distros and start calling themselves "nightly" distros, so everyone is aware of the potential instability? Is there any rolling release distro that already follows the suggestion of only distributing tagged releases?

I think this is asking that we avoid additional episodes like the Redhat gcc "2.96" issue where redhat took cvs head, and slapped a version number on it that would have been the next release and shipped it with their "stable" distribution. GCC devs got tons of complaints about their shipping a broken compiler that couldn't compile the kernel and tracked it down to redhat shipping pre-release WIP software as if it were the new release version. GCC completely skipped the 2.96 version number, so "2.96" ended up being a redhat exclusive-- the fake 2.96 would have been a recurring source of pain due to confused redhat users making bug reports to the gcc project.

https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc-announce/2000/msg00003.htm...

Re: Do not ship work in progress: An open letter

#44

Post by matkoniecz »

> when a project is being actively developed, tagged releases are the only safe option to ship to users.

Not always. https://github.com/clementine-player/Clementine is a great software, being developed but for some reason without release since 2016.

Last release does not work anymore, shipping master branch works.

Re: Do not ship work in progress: An open letter

#45

Post by natch »

kirbyfan64sos wrote: post #36
natch wrote: post #30

So if there’s a patch that fixes a devastating bug then distros should ship with the bug, got it. Or reach out to the developer who does not respond to email (who is likely also not a signer of this open letter and who may or may not agree with it). Multiply this (futile) reach-out step times however many developers are involved in touching any code of any project being shipped during any if the multiple days, weeks,…

The page literally addresses this: > We thank all the distribution package maintainers for backporting patches that improve security, fix bugs, etc. who coordinate with upstream. Often times this means creating or pulling patches to fix issues with inactive/abandoned/unresponsive upstream projects. These distribution package maintainers are doing a tremendous job and their work is not the subject of this letter. > Th…

I wouldn’t say it addresses it so much as it acknowledges it as an issue without offering a workable solution.

Re: Do not ship work in progress: An open letter

#46

Post by voydik »

Mostly agree. I recently caught up with Peter from Journey.io for an interview and he mentioned exactly this. Something along the lines of "the era of janky MVPs is over." There's certainly a balance of shipping an MVP and shipping crap. I think if you routinely ship crap, or things that are subpar, for the sake of speed, users will start to associate all of your work with crap.

Re: Do not ship work in progress: An open letter

#47

Post by dewey »

matkoniecz wrote: post #44

> when a project is being actively developed, tagged releases are the only safe option to ship to users. Not always. https://github.com/clementine-player/Clementine is a great software, being developed but for some reason without release since 2016. Last release does not work anymore, shipping master branch works.

The author isn't saying that it's the only possible way to ship software to users, he's saying that it's the only safe / good option.

Just because some project without a proper release cycle does it doesn't make this statement any less true.

Re: Do not ship work in progress: An open letter

#48

Post by [deleted] »

rob74 wrote: post #6
kop316 wrote: post #4

For some additional context: https://blog.brixit.nl/why-i-left-pine64/ Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32494659 > Supporting Manjaro has historically done very little to facilitate the development of the software stack which is necessary for these devices [Pinephone/Pinephone Pro] to work. In some cases the Manjaro involvement actually causes extra workload for the developers by shipping known broken v…

So distros like Manjaro should stop calling themselves "rolling release" distros and start calling themselves "nightly" distros, so everyone is aware of the potential instability? Is there any rolling release distro that already follows the suggestion of only distributing tagged releases?

[deleted]

Re: Do not ship work in progress: An open letter

#49

Post by speeder »

This applies even to games. Although it is normal now for games have early access releases, it is becoming common for rushed 1.0 releases and then patching coming later... coupled with a ton of negative reviews, backlash and lost sales.

I wonder why publishers don't realize people expect the product to be done when you remove "beta" from its name.

Re: Do not ship work in progress: An open letter

#50

Post by mschuster91 »

jsty wrote: post #9
andix wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting thought :D But it would probably create even more legal issues and also risks. A lot of people don’t use software, that has a non-standard way of licensing (like MIT, BSD, Apache, GPL). Just because there is a risk that you step into a legal trap.

If only the WIP commits were non-Free then relicensed to Free for each release, then the legal uncertainty would probably have the desired effect - no packager / distro worth their salt would touch any non-release with a barge pole. Such an unorthodox approach would risk scaring them off completely though. In a roundabout way it's pretty much trying to re-invent the trademark system (ie. "don't distribute this code a…

> Quite frankly far easier to just get a trademark if that's the desired effect.

Trademarks cost serious upfront money - Germany alone is 290€ [1], EU-wide 850€ [2], the US 250$ [3] and worldwide is a hot mess [4]. Additionally, it seems like you need a lawyer in the US to handle the process if you're not an US resident, and you have to renew them every couple of years and not forget to tell the patent/trademark office of address changes. Not everyone is willing to put up that much money and effort for an open-source project that won't generate any income.

Additionally, trademarks usually force the holder to publicly register their name and address, which is simply not a good idea at all for many persons - trolls, spammers and outright criminals can and will use every bit of information they get to cause harm. And for collectives that run an open-source project, trademarks will be yet another issue - what to do when the holder of the trademark dies or disappears, or when they get into some sort of conflict?

[1] https://www.dpma.de/marken/

[2] https://euipo.europa.eu/ohimportal/en/fees-and-payments

[3] https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/basics/how-much-does-it-cos...

[3] https://www.wipo.int/madrid/en/

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