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

drmaciver.com

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

#81

Post by gingerlime »

Jesus_piece wrote: post #57
freedomben wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you tell them why you were closing the issues as #WONTFIX? I maintain a few projects in the "hundreds of stars" range, and I also send PRs to numerous projects with regularity (I make a point to fix typos and such in documentation when I find them). 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 takin…

I think that's the point. Maintainers have no obligation to do anything for anyone

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 interaction I’ll make sure to disable issues/comments or otherwise communicate this intent.

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

#82

Post by jimsmart »

koheripbal wrote: post #13
dnautics wrote: post #5

As the author of shitty open source libraries I agree, but a bit of a disclaimer in the readme should be expected.

Should I remove all the "TODO:" lines first?

I don't in any of my open projects. They're there for a reason!

Many of them are written in a way that is probably useful to another coder who is taking the time to look at that piece of code — whether because of an issue, or for 'fun'.

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

#83

Post by CameronNemo »

pabs3 wrote: post #27
andrewstuart wrote: post #23

Earlier 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Problem is there's no auto detection that a repo is no longer maintained.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"No longer maintained" is hard to define, does no commits in the last year mean "this project is mature and needs no changes", "this project is dead and should not be used" or "the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?

Exactly. It is subjective. One just needs to look at the contribution history and determine if it is what they need.

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

#86

Post by digianarchist »

nerdbaggy wrote: post #2

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.

Have you ever wandered into the issues section on Github for say a jQuery slider library or Wordpress plugin?

Oh boy you'd have thought people had paid thousands of dollars for the code the way people talk to the maintainers.

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

#87

Post by galonk »

I wrote a Python library that was pretty popular at one time. I gave a talk on it at PyCon, at one point it was in the top 200 most downloaded packages on PyPI.

Since my employer told me I was no longer allowed to work on it at work, I have felt quite a lot of guilt about all but abandoning fixing bugs and reading the mailing list. I've been working on a "next generation" version, almost a rewrite, but I don't see a clear path for releasing it in a way that helps people still using the current version.

It may be self-serving, but I am really going to try to take this essay to heart, and not beat myself up everytime a weekend goes by that I don't spend working on my project.

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

#88

Post by CameronNemo »

conroy wrote: post #6

I 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”.

Your project is somewhat similar to sqlboiler, but not quite the same. You may want to link to it as a complement or alternative when you think it would do a better job of what someone is asking for.

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

#89

Post by Justsignedup »

I once wrote a library in backbone.js to have a data-synchronized list. It allowed me to provide an array, and it'll keep that array sync'd up to what I saw.

I had a kid and a fulltime job and going through a divorce. I happened to use it at my job, but everyone kept asking for me to integrate it into new up and coming repos which I didn't have time for. Honestly I felt bad about not caring, but the reality is that I didn't. I had other things on my mind.

Some people are DINKs (dual income, no kids) and get bored so instead of video games they'll make a side project. Some people have totally other circumstances. For me I wanted my spare time to either zone out to some games, or zone in to spending time with my daughter. I had plenty of coding to do at work.

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