Comment by jorvi
3 months ago
> If you're the author of a library, you have to cover every possible way in which your code might be used.
You don't actually. You write the library for how you use it, and you accept pull requests that extend it if you feel it has merit.
If you don't, people are free to fork it and pull in your improvements periodically. Or their fork gets more popular, and you get to swap in a library that is now better-maintained by the community.
As long as you pin your package, you're better off. Replicating code pretty quickly stops making sense.
It's a rare developer (or human for that matter) who can just shrug and say "fork off" when asked for help with their library.
It really depends. If it's the occasional request and I can bang out a solution in 30 minutes, I'll help. But I'll also weigh how much maintenance burden it'll be going forward. And if I won't do it myself, I'd always give some quick pointers.
Maintenance demands (your library X doesn't work with Python Y, please maintain another version for me) I'd shrug off. Wait for me, pay me, or fix it yourself.
It would be healthy that it becomes more common, in fact the privately-owned public garden model of the Valetudo project [1] is the sanest way for FOSS maintainers to look at their projects.
[1]: https://github.com/Hypfer/Valetudo#valetudo-is-a-garden