Comment by ggreer

10 years ago

I maintain a C repo[1] and user idiocy is much lower than what I've seen in JS projects of similar popularity. Still, I agree with these criticisms of GitHub. I hate +1 spam enough to delete such comments. Sometimes I even ban those who do it. I'm frustrated by people who open idiotic issues[2][3][4][5]. I procrastinate on bad pull requests because my options are:

1. Close the PR with little or no comment. People then think I'm an asshole.

2. Spend hours explaining why the code is terrible and why it can't be improved. In addition to being a big time sink, PR submitters often don't understand the criticisms. Half the time, they still think I'm wrong.

People even defend stuff as obviously wrong as adding a thousand lines of GPL'd code to an Apache-licensed project.[6] Then they say I should remove .gitignore support from ag because it doesn't implement 100% of .gitignore syntax. As if users would be happier with tons of extraneous results instead of some extraneous results.

A lot of this is cultural, but GitHub could help steer things in a better direction with the features proposed in this letter. I hope they take this letter seriously.

1. https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher

2. User accuses ag of hard-locking his computer: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/issues/791

3. User wants ag to always print filenames, unlike every other tool out there: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/issues/749

4. User wants ag to replace PCRE with a totally different, incompatible regex library: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/issues/698

5. User aliases 'ag' to 'grep', then complains ag doesn't work: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/issues/578

6. https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/pull/614

13 comments

ggreer

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monkmartinez  10 years ago

I actually hesitate to really "watch" repos because the sheer volume of email generated is staggering. I take my hat off to those who run successful OSS projects. Thank you!

imtringued  10 years ago

About number 5. I don't see anyone complaining about anything.

  • ggreer  10 years ago

    Maybe "complain" is too strong, but he created a GitHub issue –notifying several hundred people– without running ag --version. Heck, he didn't even look at the output of his command. It was immediately obvious to me, from the limited information he provided, that it was a bash alias.

    • shurcooL  10 years ago

      Do you really want people to be afraid to report an issue in case it's something silly/not an actual problem? Would that be better?

      I guess it depends on the project and its contribution guidelines.

      1 reply →

  • sondr3  10 years ago

    True, but it's still user problems that aren't problems with the software itself. Far too often you get people who want help with _everything_ on a project, from installing the right language, their editor and so on when it's not something that really concerns you.