Comment by BrandoElFollito
3 hours ago
> dnsmasq has served me well for like an eternity in multiple setups for different use cases. As all software it has bugs. And once located those get fixed. Its author is also easy to communicate with.
I concur. The last part, however, is quite worrisome. Dnsmasq is ran by one person, published on their own git and I did not see any information about other maintainers.
It is a super important (and great, and useful, and everything) software and i have fears of what will happen one day.
Sure, someone can clone and push to github but it may seriously fragment the ecosystem.
Surprisingly a lot of popular projects are mainly one-person projects.
In my experience projects lead by large corporates burnt me a lot more in the past and caused more serious friction in my setups (e.g. breaking backwards compatibility for the sake of killing 5 lines of code that could cause some extra "development costs".)
Anyway… that's not saying one is better than the other. Trust into a project builds different over time (unrelated to the size of the development team).
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Seeing it here, how someone "shamelessly" (in their own words) adverts their own competing project and then uses dummy accounts to bend the voting and discussion in their favouring… that's definitely NOT how trust is build up. It's something which instantly makes me stay away from a project (better or not).
My point was not in the one-person aspect (I use fantastic software done by one person, I also develop some (used by a niche)), it is the bus factor that is worrisome.
Some projects die because the dev abandons them (slowly or abruptly). Usually you see this happening with time and have the time to turn around.
The bus factor is drastic. One day the project lives and the next day it is gone. There is nobody anymore to push PRs etc. As I said, you can have it picked up via a fork and hope for the best (= that current users will somehow know). havng a backup contibutor eevn just to make the transition is a nice thing to have.
> Seeing it here, how someone "shamelessly" (in their own words) adverts their own competing project and then uses dummy accounts to bend the voting and discussion in their favouring… that's definitely NOT how trust is build up. It's something which instantly makes me stay away from a project (better or not).
Not sure how this relates to my comment?