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I love open source and work with it every day. I used to contribute but I grew tired of interacting with difficult people. Some project owners are grumpy, or pe

by xfitm3 8y ago

I love open source and work with it every day. I used to contribute but I grew tired of interacting with difficult people. Some project owners are grumpy, or perhaps someone wants to bike shed every detail. I shouldn't let it get to me, but I did.

rectang 8y ago
I don't think we've reached an equilibrium yet about what we can expect from open source maintainers. It's difficult because there's no contract spelling out what the responsibilities are, and the maintainers can have anywhere from "throw it over the wall" to comprehensive support. This is a challenge for Open Source governance going forwards. We have certain expectations for a project which is governed by a commercial entity; we have certain expectations for a project at the Apache Software Foundation which is governed by its community; and so on. Perhaps other systems of governance will gel over time and both users and developers will develop more predictable and codified ideas about what kind of support to expect.
ChrisFoster 8y ago
This is hard to get right. Personally I try not to be a grumpy maintainer but I'm frequently a picky one. Lately I've been an absent one. I think maintainers can frequently come across as grumpy simply because their goals are different from contributors. They have to live in and fix the codebase for the long term, so have a proportionally higher stake in consistency while also having a much broader knowledge of the rest of the code. It's hard not to nitpick in this situation. For the contributor, they're frequently trying to get some other work done and would rather not have endless back and forth over the precise detail. Furthermore their feature or bugfix is clearly a good idea because it solves their own problem. A problem that, unfortunately, the maintainer doesn't have. Perhaps a partial solution is in treating project maintainership itself as an engineering problem. That is, having automated testing infrastructure, developer tooling for code consistency, etc. This kind of stuff has become dramatically easier to set up for small open source projects, but depending on the language it can still be a lot of effort.

by xfitm3 8y ago

rectang 8y ago

I don't think we've reached an equilibrium yet about what we can expect from open source maintainers. It's difficult because there's no contract spelling out what the responsibilities are, and the maintainers can have anywhere from "throw it over the wall" to comprehensive support. This is a challenge for Open Source governance going forwards. We have certain expectations for a project which is governed by a commercial entity; we have certain expectations for a project at the Apache Software Foundation which is governed by its community; and so on. Perhaps other systems of governance will gel over time and both users and developers will develop more predictable and codified ideas about what kind of support to expect.

ChrisFoster 8y ago

This is hard to get right. Personally I try not to be a grumpy maintainer but I'm frequently a picky one. Lately I've been an absent one. I think maintainers can frequently come across as grumpy simply because their goals are different from contributors. They have to live in and fix the codebase for the long term, so have a proportionally higher stake in consistency while also having a much broader knowledge of the rest of the code. It's hard not to nitpick in this situation. For the contributor, they're frequently trying to get some other work done and would rather not have endless back and forth over the precise detail. Furthermore their feature or bugfix is clearly a good idea because it solves their own problem. A problem that, unfortunately, the maintainer doesn't have. Perhaps a partial solution is in treating project maintainership itself as an engineering problem. That is, having automated testing infrastructure, developer tooling for code consistency, etc. This kind of stuff has become dramatically easier to set up for small open source projects, but depending on the language it can still be a lot of effort.