Comment by geofft
5 years ago
As an open-source developer myself, I'm annoyed when people do that. I want them to rely on my product, not my code. I want them to update when I publish new versions and I want them to send patches back.
There are even almost-open-source licenses that compel you to send patches back. I don't want to use one. I want to treat them with respect and I hope they treat me with respect in turn.
I don't know what planet you live on, but people need a local mirror of your stuff for reasons such as, oh, so that their continuous integration builds don't stop when your server is not reachable.
Most users are not going to use your today's daily build, nor should they. Only people who are more than casually involved with your project can be expected to contribute changes which are rebased to the current.
If things are working for some users, and there is no security advisory that affects them, they have no reason to update to every new version.
Anyway, between you and the users, there may be middlemen: the distro package maintainers. Those people will lag in picking up your changes, and may push back on bad ones that break things for them.
People should mostly get stable things from their distros, not straight from the horse's mouth.
For instance, if I'm building something on Ubuntu 18, I will use the make, bison, shell and whatever else that is packaged on Ubuntu 18; I'm not going to pull these things from the tips of their repos and rebuild their latest versions.