3 ms·

caveat, I wrote the "thought experiment" post, so this is not unbiased, but how "deadly" was the Node.js/io.js fork, really? io.js merged back into Node and bas

caveat, I wrote the "thought experiment" post, so this is not unbiased, but how "deadly" was the Node.js/io.js fork, really? io.js merged back into Node and basically became the canonical implementation. My blog post is about situations where the community's already disunified anyway, so the remark about "forking a community is deadly" misses my main point -- but even if that weren't the case, wouldn't the Node/io situation be the best example that forking a community sometimes turns out great?

alexwebb2 11y ago
> how "deadly" was the Node.js/io.js fork, really? It wasn't, ultimately - it just served as a reality check for the Node maintainers at the time and helped spur some much-needed changes to the way the project was being managed. The fact that there can only be one truly canonical repo forced the disaffected contributors to splinter off into an entirely new project with a different name. If that wasn't the case, and forks were truly first-class repos, then they may have opted for that instead - and we'd have had "node" and "other node" instead. Personally, I think that would have been much muddier. The node/io.js split and eventual reunion is a fantastic example of why the system as it stands currently - which strongly encourages schisms to be explicit and branded distinctly - is in fact a very practical model.
- tessierashpool 11y ago
  > The node/io.js split and eventual reunion is a fantastic example of why the system as it stands currently - which strongly encourages schisms to be explicit and branded distinctly - is in fact a very practical model. Well, maybe, for large projects, where there's a defined community with lots of visibility. Not for small projects with no hype spotlight shining on them. And even then, it didn't work out that beautifully for Express.js, either, which was not exactly obscure.

alexwebb2 11y ago

> how "deadly" was the Node.js/io.js fork, really? It wasn't, ultimately - it just served as a reality check for the Node maintainers at the time and helped spur some much-needed changes to the way the project was being managed. The fact that there can only be one truly canonical repo forced the disaffected contributors to splinter off into an entirely new project with a different name. If that wasn't the case, and forks were truly first-class repos, then they may have opted for that instead - and we'd have had "node" and "other node" instead. Personally, I think that would have been much muddier. The node/io.js split and eventual reunion is a fantastic example of why the system as it stands currently - which strongly encourages schisms to be explicit and branded distinctly - is in fact a very practical model.

tessierashpool 11y ago
> The node/io.js split and eventual reunion is a fantastic example of why the system as it stands currently - which strongly encourages schisms to be explicit and branded distinctly - is in fact a very practical model. Well, maybe, for large projects, where there's a defined community with lots of visibility. Not for small projects with no hype spotlight shining on them. And even then, it didn't work out that beautifully for Express.js, either, which was not exactly obscure.