Comment by kissgyorgy
5 years ago
If you don't understand the authors frustration, read Daniel Stenberg blog about what kind of requests he gets about curl. It's insane and ridiculous, not everybody is capable of/wanting to deal with all kinds of shit and hostile users like Daniel.
I understand the worry.
But he hasn't had to face any of that, and a couple different methods to avoid that happening were suggested and rejected offhand.
That's entirely reasonable if it's happened/happening to you AND you have no means to stop it from continuing.
In this case it clearly hasn't happened to this author (yet) AND the nixos devs have put forward a selection of reasonable proposals to prevent it happening to him. All of which he has rejected without and real justification.
If you read the full thread it becomes clear that his citing fear of support burden is not made in good faith. His acts of blocking redistribution of his package in any Linux distro (here & Fedora at least) is clearly a bigger burden for him to take on than he would take on if he allowed the redistributions.
So...don't publish software? That's part of the game, no?
No! You are not obligated to receive support for software just because it was written by someone else.
There is a considerable difference between getting requests and providing support. You don't have to provide support, but it's a little hard not to get requests.
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I don't think GP was saying that anyone is obligated to provide support, just that receiving support requests is intrinsically part of publishing software as source. The only way to avoid receiving requests is to abstain.
To be fair, the reason the curl author is being contacted is because (IIRC) he advertises his name and ways to contact him in curl. The point of advertising yourself is to get people to contact you, and you can't control who does (but can ignore them).
Maybe it comes with it, but I think you have no obligation to deal with it if you don't want to.
That's not related to this particular issue though.
You don't understand the issue then. The author don't want to deal with all kinds of requests unrelated to his own package. NixOS is an operating system, totally understandable he doesn't want to deal with OS issues.
But people on NixOS may use his software...if not in nixpkgs then someone will just maintain their own overlay that many people use. It's impossible to stop - if there's demand by NixOS users for this software, they're gonna package it up and patch it in order to keep Nix Nix..
Hell, I could go make that overlay right now and link it in a nixpkgs issue for discoverability. What's this frenk person gonna do? Cut me an issue saying "pls delete this code from the internet"? Hah!
Why would users report to his project when installing Home Assistant? That's not usually how it works and Home Assistant has a lot of other dependencies.
His library was written specifically for Home Assistant and it's an internal dependency that no one usually sees. It's a 300 lines wrapper for Ambee API.
Do you have a link? I'd love to read this.
For example NASA https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2020/12/17/curl-supports-nasa/
I think he also posts some of the funny ones on Twitter
That's exactly what came to my mind too. I think the sqlite folks have similar struggles.
except he doesn't have to do anything he doesn't want to. ignore/delete. Problem solved.