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A Sad Day for Rust

words.steveklabnik.com

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Re: A Sad Day for Rust

#891

Post by growse »

steveklabnik wrote: post #849
godshatter wrote: post #821

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? What's the danger here? Is the original maintainer going to send someone named Vinny to break your legs if you fork a project that won't accept a security patch you need? I think you should just fork it privately, apply your patch, and move on with your life.

If you're keeping it private, none of this applies. I'm talking about "hey that project is bad, I am now maintaining a competing project, please use it instead."

Instead of framing it as "that project is objectively bad, my one is better", why not say "my project is a fork of this project but with a bit less unsafe" and then see what the community does?

Forking isn't provocative. Forking and then claiming your fork is objectively superior is.

Re: A Sad Day for Rust

#892

Post by namibj »

_-___________-_ wrote: post #352

I've written a lot of Rust code that's in production in web, messaging and telephony contexts. I considered using Actix early on, but as soon as I saw the large amount of unsafe code, I stopped considering it at all. I did not go on the Internet and try to convince other people not to use it. I did not complain at the maintainer that he should manage his project differently. I just didn't see why a library doing what…

I'm curious what you'd recommend instead for async pgsql requirements as a Rust web framework. Actix seemed interesting, but I didn't know about the masses of unsafe. These too eliminate it, because it'd be able to crash/break a cluster that uses deliberate unsoundness for its serialization/deserialization needs in the vain of speed (timely-dataflow), allowing memory issues to spread (at least in theory)... I thus can't use a framework that uses this much unsafs/has known stray pointers or similar bugd/issues.

Re: A Sad Day for Rust

#893

Post by chachachoney »

pimeys wrote: post #846
timjver wrote: post #777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could very well be thanks to the moderators, but I hardly saw any nasty comments on r/rust. People were critical of the actix maintainer, sure, but I didn't see anything that crossed the line. Some comments in the GitHub issues were indeed nasty, but those were actually called out on the subreddit. There's no way for me to know for sure, but it seems as though Klabnik was exaggerating here.

Well, I've certainly seen some nasty behavior in topics touching the async-std crate that I didn't like and thought should not be written. It felt really bad and was the first time I felt how this community has changed from the years I started writing Rust.

>> It felt really bad and was the first time I felt how this community has changed from the years I started writing Rust.

I agree. I'm further disheartened by a lot of the reactions that happened since. One of Rust's greatest strengths is turning into a weakness.

The Rust community needs to treat this cultural exploit as if it were a critical technical exploit and apply the same sort of objective and collective examination of source and insightful exploration of assumptions made about existing grammars and syntax and come up with appropriately safe and forward thinking solutions to ensure that the code of conduct isn't just a progressive cliche.

Re: A Sad Day for Rust

#894

Post by infinity0 »

_-___________-_ wrote: post #352

I've written a lot of Rust code that's in production in web, messaging and telephony contexts. I considered using Actix early on, but as soon as I saw the large amount of unsafe code, I stopped considering it at all. I did not go on the Internet and try to convince other people not to use it. I did not complain at the maintainer that he should manage his project differently. I just didn't see why a library doing what…

I don't like contempt culture either but there's a balance to be made here - if you let everyone do everything and encourage them all as special snowflakes that can't create anything crappy, a community will also go to shit.

In this case it does sound like people initially were very nice and tried to give the author very polite suggestions on improvement, and it was only after the author being extremely dismissive[1], not admitting to his own flaws, not wanting to learn from others, and abusing his own power in shutting down valid discussion, that things turned nasty.

The fact that the author deleted many of the linked issues e.g. https://github.com/fafhrd91/actix-net/issues/83 really feels like he is playing the victim here and taking everyone for a ride, denying his own responsibility in all this drama that's unfolded.

Yes a community should be open and forgiving, but blindly forgiving someone who doesn't even admit their own mistakes, who doesn't even understand what they are being forgiven for, is naive and also will result in community destruction.

I also don't buy the "if you don't like it just don't use it" argument. If it's actively dangerous and you know this, and you know that other people don't know this, you do have a responsibility to (politely) inform others about it. Simplying "not using it" is plain negligence.

[1] "the patch is boring", LOL WTF I would never have even come up with something this insulting even when I wanted to actively piss someone off, kudos for imaginativity

Re: A Sad Day for Rust

#895

Post by notriddle »

zozbot234 wrote: post #678
TrueDuality wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The developer actively fought against this for a very long time, even before the reddit shit storms. Yes the community could have forked the project and started independent development. I'd argue that forking and developing independently of the developer is as big of a middle finger as a developer taking their ball and going home. It just depends on who is on the receiving end. I don't think either side is right here…

> I don't think either side is right here, but I don't think creating a public fork and building a community around that is an unbiased and neutral response Linux distro maintainers routinely create "public forks" even of actively-maintained packages, and no one sane views that as a hostile move or something to complain about. It's part of curating a well-kept ecosystem around your solutions.

> Linux distro maintainers routinely create "public forks" even of actively-maintained packages, and no one sane views that as a hostile move or something to complain about.

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/04/i-would-like-debian-to-stop...

Re: A Sad Day for Rust

#896

Post by bachmeier »

kelnos wrote: post #822
bachmeier wrote: post #762

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no need to flame people for running their open-source project the way they want to run it. You can just not use the code. It works both ways. You put something out there, you need to be ready for the response. I'm not a Rust user, but presumably there was a reason other than charity that he put it out there (show off his brilliance, use it to get jobs, I don't know - but it was something he did for his own…

I don't think "entitlement" means what you think it means. Unless you're arguing that people shouldn't feel entitled to be free of harassment, in which case I don't agree with you. Yes, if you put something out there, you should expect feedback, and assume that some of that feedback is not going to be very nice. But that doesn't excuse the people giving that feedback for being rude. It doesn't excuse the fact that th…

Well, I'm using the dictionary definition:

entitled: to furnish with proper grounds for seeking or claiming something

example: this ticket entitles the bearer to free admission

Being an open source maintainer doesn't mean you're entitled to recognition or praise or deference. You're not entitled to put out low-quality software and have others pretend it's awesome. You're not entitled to make claims that are false and not be called out for it. You're not even entitled to people not trashing your work. When you put your work out there because you want to be praised, that's the downside.

"But that doesn't excuse the people giving that feedback for being rude."

That has nothing to do with being entitled (at least not in the context of an open source project). That's basic human interaction.

Re: A Sad Day for Rust

#897

Post by nicoburns »

rudedogg wrote: post #716
dbcfd wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now, if you want async/await, you either have warp or tide. Hopefully gotham or rocket gets around to updating.

Can anyone comment on how close Rocket is to a 0.5 release? I’ve been wondering for awhile, but opening an issue to ask seems annoying.

I've been following this quite closely. Most of the work seems to be done. But development is very stop-start in fits and bursts, so it's hard to tell how much longer it will take.

Re: A Sad Day for Rust

#898

Post by hjek »

spamizbad wrote: post #25

Question: why didn’t the more safety-focused developers just fork the project? I feel like fork-o-phobia causes 90% of the incidents like this.

Exactly. Like the GraphicsMagick fork of ImageMagick.

Re: A Sad Day for Rust

#899

Post by zpallin »

School-Cotton wrote: post #862
zpallin wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I agree completely. Except when you claim you're a "maintainer." If you do, that is supposed to mean something. And I think it means you're going to maintain the code. That's the only responsibility I am talking about.

Maintainer is a term of art that just means you’re the person in charge of the project.

Well, no.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_maintainer

Re: A Sad Day for Rust

#900

Post by roblabla »

nindalf wrote: post #826
iforgotpassword wrote: post #799

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well they didn't find any specific issues. Just the overall code looked not up to their standards as well as how the maintainer dealt with feedback. What do you suggest one does in such a case? Every time I stumble upon shitty open source code, am I supposed to fix it and if the maintainer refuses the patches, patrol the internet and try to prevent anyone from using it?

> they didn't find any specific issues The linked article specifically mentions that a specific soundness issue had been found and a fix had been submitted as well. If they had done nothing, it would have attracted no comment. If they had allowed another maintainer to review and merge, it would have attracted no comment. But they went out of their way to denigrate the people who called attention to this issue, called…

> But they went out of their way to denigrate the people who called attention to this issue, called the issue "boring", rejected the patch, then deleted the issue and all comments.

This is an unfair characterization of what happened. Here's another version: The maintainer did not denigrate anyone, he did call the patch "boring" (which isn't really an insult or anything?), worked on his own patch (without closing the previous PR mind you). People immediately starting shitting on the maintainer - within the hour - because the PR had not been merged. Maintainer chose to delete the issue to avoid it devolving into the usual mess. More shitting contest happened here on HN, on Reddit, and elsewhere.

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