I had a GitHub project that got a few hundred stars. The amount of mean, crazy, and entitled people is crazy. I have no idea how the bigger projects can deal with it.
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It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)
61–70 of 364 posts
Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)
#62I had a GitHub project that got a few hundred stars. The amount of mean, crazy, and entitled people is crazy. I have no idea how the bigger projects can deal with it.
Yeah, I feel that for sure. I MITMed my robot vacuum and wrote a little python library for it. I assumed that it would, like my other open source code, get approximately no attention. Even at a couple hundred stars, it became a notable pain in the ass. When that vacuum died, freeing me from any sense of responsibility for the code, it was a sweet day indeed.
Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)
#63If you find an open source library that could be better, and you are using it, make it better yourself.
Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)
#64I had a GitHub project that got a few hundred stars. The amount of mean, crazy, and entitled people is crazy. I have no idea how the bigger projects can deal with it.
I have few projects on 1k+ stars; the ones that are more beginner-friendly are normally where I get most unrelated requests. I used to help people where possible, but now I just don't have the time (or TBH, motivation). So I closed the issues on those two projects that got most low-quality issues. People started to open PR to tell me I was wrong and I should open the issues. This cemented my decision, oh the entitlem…
> People started to open PR to tell me I was wrong and I should open the issues.
Did those pull requests have code changes?
Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Problem is there's no auto detection that a repo is no longer maintained. Easy to do but github does not do it.
"No longer maintained" is hard to define, does no commits in the last year mean "this project is mature and needs no changes", "this project is dead and should not be used" or "the author still cares about this project but is busy with other stuff this year" or something else?
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Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)
#66I maintain an open source project with ~2k stars ( https://github.com/kyleconroy/sqlc ). There’s a large list of bug reports and feature requests, but since I don’t work on it full time, I’ve gotten really good at saying “No” and “I’m sorry”.
You can probably leave the sorry part out. There’s nothing to be sorry about :-)
Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's understandable. You closed issues for bugs you didn't resolve.
Maybe you know the OP, but in my experience a lot of issues are not bug reports but very low quality, uninformed or unreasonable requests or questions. Like questions made about basic functionality that is answered in the documentation/faq, or requests for features that are completely outside the scope of the project. Another popular category is requests for basic education e.g. “how does DQN work?”. That’s fine if i…
Sure. On the other hand, sometimes people put a lot of time and effort into isolating an issue and writing up the best description they can manage. Closing the issue is a one-click FU to the people who are doing their best to help.
Some users are overly entitled, but some maintainers are self-absorbed douchebags. I've seen both sides.
Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)
#68Earlier 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.
> I'd get all sorts of entitled requests, borderline "plz fix my website you broke it" which will be interesting to see if you ask them for payment for fixes, would they pay?
That’s exactly what I would do. It’s very similar to people asking you to fix their computer for free when you have tech skills. Ask money (even just 5€) and 90% of requests fade away. The one that remains are willing to pay (and more than a few bucks).
Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless you have something specific to point out / warn users about, why? It is what it is, and unless users contribute something back to make it better, it's cost them nothing. If they did contribute something back, then hopefully it's a little less shitty. Unless the library in question is objectively bad and/or non-functional, no apologies or disclaimers are necessary.
Why not? Sticking a disclaimer saying "this has basically no test coverage" at the top of your readme has negligible cost and might stop someone from being fired. Of course, there's no obligation or even expectation that you should provide such a warning, but if you're already thinking about it, might as well just do it.
At risk of sounding like a gatekeeper, maybe someone getting reprimanded for using an untested, production unready library isn't a bad thing.
It's not realistic to read through all the source of every dependency you use, but it should be encouraged for developers to take a more active approach in evaluating dependencies they pull in - at least to check how active development is, what sort of open issues there may be, test coverage, code quality sniff tests, what the license is etc.
I'd be willing to bet most GPL violations are due to ignorance, rather than intentional.
Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)
#70I had a GitHub project that got a few hundred stars. The amount of mean, crazy, and entitled people is crazy. I have no idea how the bigger projects can deal with it.
Yeah, I feel that for sure. I MITMed my robot vacuum and wrote a little python library for it. I assumed that it would, like my other open source code, get approximately no attention. Even at a couple hundred stars, it became a notable pain in the ass. When that vacuum died, freeing me from any sense of responsibility for the code, it was a sweet day indeed.
Oddly cute story. :)