Comment by mabbo

5 years ago

> if I see you approaching a door, I am under no obligation to open it just because I'm physically able to, but if I open a door for you, I'd better hold it until you're finished walking through, or I'm a jerk. By holding the door open, I've made an implicit promise that I'm not going to close it on you.

This reminds me of an incident years ago. I was on a city bus, very full of people, and we were just about to leave a stop. There's a woman maybe 150 feet away running towards the bus. The driver sees her running and re-opens the door, waiting. Inconvenience to all of us on the bus, but hey, she's running.

The woman, seeing the bus has waited for her, stops running and starts slowly walking instead.

Driver sighs, closes the door, drives away.

I'm not sure what the moral lesson I take from it is, but mainly "if I go out of my way to help you, don't take advantage of my generosity". Maybe that partially applies to situations like this one. Or maybe just "don't annoy transit operators". That's a good one too.

23 comments

mabbo

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geofft  5 years ago

I think that's fair - especially the part about not taking advantage of generosity. But I don't think that's what happened here. Someone reported a soundness bug. Someone else (IIRC) posted a patch fixing it by switching from a custom Cell type to the standard library one, which is what the maintainer called uncreative and boring. Fixing a soundness bug is a perfectly reasonable, non-advantage-taking thing to do in a PR.

(I agree that in general there is a problem with open-source users feeling entitled to support/features and maintainers not feeling comfortable saying no, but that doesn't seem to be the type of incident that triggered this, and more generally it is difficult for me to see how a patch would count as that - at least a patch that isn't "please maintain this pile of new code," which this one wasn't.)

  • rumanator  5 years ago

    > Someone reported a soundness bug.

    Your description starts off on the wrong foot because a) there was no bug, and b) although the library used unsafe code extensively, its maintainer argued that was not a problem and that didn't meant the code was unsafe.

    So in the end we only have issues being reported by opinionated users trying to force their personal opinions on a project maintainer, who due to the content and tone of said issue reporters decided not to accept the reports or patches. Once some bad apples in the community started to increase the unpleasantness of the whole experience, the maintainer said enough is enough.

saagarjha  5 years ago

In this case, the maintainer made an active and conscious decision to do something that did nothing but hurt everyone using the project. There are no passengers who might benefit here, sadly.

  • tastroder  5 years ago

    Since this seems to be a constant point in this thread but I don't see it: How exactly did that person hurt anybody? They maintained this project for 3(?) years and the code is readily available elsewhere on github now. If there's really that many people being inconvenienced by that, surely somebody else will take over that fork instead.

    • saagarjha  5 years ago

      This person killed the momentum that this project had, much of which was only partly their work. Forks fracture a project’s community and pit the pieces against each other: occasionally they work out, but often they all just fizzle into nothingness. Keeping a project together has value. (Also, note that associated GitHub metadata such as issues has been wiped.)

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  • rossjudson  5 years ago

    I think you are confused. The maintainer made an active and conscious decision to protect himself. That's clearly not "nothing", and a perfectly legitimate reason.

    • saagarjha  5 years ago

      I think there are a number of ways the maintainer could have protected themselves without making it actively worse for the community. I would even predict that this decision makes them likely to get even more abuse, though of course I would never condone that.

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    • nindalf  5 years ago

      They're referring to the maintainer's conscious decision to reject a patch made in good faith, that fixed the issues that had been pointed out. It was rejected with the statement "this is boring." Do you think this behaviour is justifiable?

      > I think you are confused

      You sure?

      6 replies →