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Am I the only one troubled with the fact that the most important third-party library in the Python ecosystem has a git history that looks like that[0]? [0] htt

Am I the only one troubled with the fact that the most important third-party library in the Python ecosystem has a git history that looks like that[0]? [0] https://github.com/psf/requests/commits/master https://github.com/psf/requests/commits/master

fnord123 7y ago
> the most important third-party library in the Python ecosystem has a git history that looks like that[0]? Your link has a typo: https://github.com/numpy/numpy/commits/master https://github.com/numpy/numpy/commits/master
- rat9988 7y ago
  Thanks! I thought I was the weird one here.
dochtman 7y ago
Given this article, I'm also very confused about this move: https://vorpus.org/blog/why-im-not-collaborating-with-kenneth-reitz/ https://vorpus.org/blog/why-im-not-collaborating-with-kennet...
- amanzi 7y ago
  What's the relevance between the git history linked to here and the article you linked to?
  - Avamander 7y ago
    The git history linked is created by the person is who the article talks about.
    - amanzi 7y ago
      Sure, but dredging up a negative article about Kenneth that has nothing to do with a messy git history feels like a witch hunt to me.
      - Hamuko 7y ago
        This seems like a fitting snippet in relation to a messy git history (full of README changes). "But none of the money was available to fulfill those commitments; instead, he was going to wait for me to implement the new features for him, and then he needed the entire $28k to pay for writing documentation for my features."
  - lozenge 7y ago
    From the headline I assumed Kenneth "donated" it to get away from all the (entirely self-caused) drama and lay low to rebuild his reputation. Instead I see he is still on the project, his name is even the first in the README (before the PSF is mentioned). Does he now have a position in PSF? Because that's just inviting problems given his past behaviour.
- nerdponx 7y ago
  Wow, I had no idea this was the situation. Is it possible that this move to the PSF is good then? Is Reitz involved in the project at all now? As a side anecdote, from my own experience with bipolar friends and family that kind of private manipulation + large-scale deception seems sadly familiar. I'm not sure if it's a feature of bipolar disorder or if it's a sad coincidence in our experiences.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - Hamuko 7y ago
    >Is Reitz involved in the project at all now? Judging by the commit history and the README.md, with his name in fancy cursive on top of the PSF logo, this seems to be the Kenneth Reitz Show featuring PSF at best.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- quicthrouw 7y ago
  I’ve heard extremely similar kinds of toxic things about the Anaconda / numpy world too. Ranging from bizarre religion issues in the workplace to top-down bullying. Not the same e.g. no similar rumors about misused grants or donations, but a lot of creepy comments about management behavior in and around numfocus / anaconda / etc.
  - murphy214 7y ago
    links/sources please? Interesting to say the last
- coldtea 7y ago
  >He was deluged with donations from both individuals and large companies like Microsoft, Google, Slack, etc., and the fundraiser total quickly reached ~$30k. Off topic, but the total looks disgustingly low, if companies like Microsoft, Google, and Slack have donated. Shame on them, they could splurge some more for the FOSS they use... >On March 15 2018, he contacted me to talk about the fundraiser. He told me he was uncertain what to do with this amount of money – he said his original goal was just to raise $5k to buy a computer. Privately, I was skeptical that the $5k computer had anything to do with Requests. Requests is a small pure-Python library; if you want to work on it, then any cheap laptop is more than sufficient. $5k is the price of a beefy server or top-end gaming rig. But I figured that even if he spent $5k of the money on some unrelated computer, we could call that compensation for his past work, and it would still leave ~$25k to fulfill the promises he'd made in the fundraiser. And this was clearly a great opportunity to build some amazing new stuff. So I didn't say anything about the computer. Until here, and if it's his project/fundraiser, it's his call. He could have spent it all on blow, and as long as he delivers the end result he raised funds for, it would be totally fine. What he actually did in the end however (not work at all for the project and expect the volunteer to do it for free while he kept all the money) is a no go...
stinos 7y ago
No :) I'm well aware a suboptimal repository commit history hygiene doesn't necessarily correlate with the actual code quality, but yeah this really doesn't look nice nor convenient to work with. I wonder e.g. what the reason is behind pushing a hundred tiny updates to the README in one day, to master?
- lovetocode 7y ago
  They are updating the README files through the github web interface and saving as they update each section.
  - Avamander 7y ago
    Why not make all the edits in one pass? It just looks horrendous. I wonder though, is there a git history fixer out there somewhere that rewrites history to merge commits with the same message into one?
    - _-___________-_ 7y ago
      `git rebase -i` and then change `pick` to `squash` for the ones you want squashed, but if you’ve pushed all the commits to master you’re now going to have to force-push master, which is... sub-optimal.
      - Avamander 7y ago
        Nah, rebase is too slow on large histories and it might not be your own commit which complicates things.
        marble-drink 7y ago
        No it isn't. Are you thinking about filter-branch?
        Avamander 7y ago
_-___________-_ 7y ago
Not nearly as troubling, but I also had a giggle at this (from README.md): > You may certianly put your trust in this code.
holmb 7y ago
Downgraded from "You can trust this code" to "You may certianly put your trust in this code" in https://github.com/psf/requests/commit/9d4fd3c968b134d98ed2789cfb376e0237cfd047 https://github.com/psf/requests/commit/9d4fd3c968b134d98ed27...
- dessant 7y ago
  By browsing the commit history it becomes clear that the PSF must revoke Kenneth's push access to preserve the integrity of the project.
  - earthboundkid 7y ago
    That feels harsh, but honestly, I think it doesn't make sense for him to have control of master. Let him make branches and do PRs like everyone else. Obviously we know that when he's in the right frame of mind he's a good coder, but when he's not he can easily break master for a hugely popular piece of infrastructure. It doesn't play to his strengths to make him the controller of master.
marble-drink 7y ago
Wow, that's awful. I've never seen a production project where a developer is allowed to push hundreds of pointless commits directly to master.
DarkCrusader2 7y ago
Oh my, last 100 or so commits are mostly just Update README.md.
- philwelch 7y ago
  Primarily to add   all over the place.
coldtea 7y ago
Looks like what? Seems like just a recent bunch of many fine grained edits to the README... This however, from TFA, is troubling: I think a lot of people don't realize how little Reitz actually has to do with Requests development. For many years now, actual maintenance has been done almost exclusively by other volunteers. If you look at the maintainers list on PyPI, you'll see he doesn't have PyPI rights to his own project, because he kept breaking stuff, so the real maintainers insisted on revoking his access. If you clone the Requests git repo, you can run git log requests/ to see a list of every time someone changed the library's source code, either directly or by merging someone else's pull request. The last time Reitz did either was in May 2017, when he made some whitespace cleanups. At least as far as commits go, his main contributions since then appear to consist of merging some small doc fixes, and monetizing the project by adding donation links, ads, intrusive sponsored links, etc. All of this money goes directly into his pocket, not the project's maintainers.
mrfusion 7y ago
What’s wrong with it?

fnord123 7y ago

> the most important third-party library in the Python ecosystem has a git history that looks like that[0]? Your link has a typo: https://github.com/numpy/numpy/commits/master https://github.com/numpy/numpy/commits/master

rat9988 7y ago
Thanks! I thought I was the weird one here.

dochtman 7y ago

Given this article, I'm also very confused about this move: https://vorpus.org/blog/why-im-not-collaborating-with-kenneth-reitz/ https://vorpus.org/blog/why-im-not-collaborating-with-kennet...

amanzi 7y ago
What's the relevance between the git history linked to here and the article you linked to?
- Avamander 7y ago
  The git history linked is created by the person is who the article talks about.
  - amanzi 7y ago
    Sure, but dredging up a negative article about Kenneth that has nothing to do with a messy git history feels like a witch hunt to me.
    - Hamuko 7y ago
      This seems like a fitting snippet in relation to a messy git history (full of README changes). "But none of the money was available to fulfill those commitments; instead, he was going to wait for me to implement the new features for him, and then he needed the entire $28k to pay for writing documentation for my features."
- lozenge 7y ago
  From the headline I assumed Kenneth "donated" it to get away from all the (entirely self-caused) drama and lay low to rebuild his reputation. Instead I see he is still on the project, his name is even the first in the README (before the PSF is mentioned). Does he now have a position in PSF? Because that's just inviting problems given his past behaviour.
nerdponx 7y ago
Wow, I had no idea this was the situation. Is it possible that this move to the PSF is good then? Is Reitz involved in the project at all now? As a side anecdote, from my own experience with bipolar friends and family that kind of private manipulation + large-scale deception seems sadly familiar. I'm not sure if it's a feature of bipolar disorder or if it's a sad coincidence in our experiences.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Hamuko 7y ago
  >Is Reitz involved in the project at all now? Judging by the commit history and the README.md, with his name in fancy cursive on top of the PSF logo, this seems to be the Kenneth Reitz Show featuring PSF at best.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
quicthrouw 7y ago
I’ve heard extremely similar kinds of toxic things about the Anaconda / numpy world too. Ranging from bizarre religion issues in the workplace to top-down bullying. Not the same e.g. no similar rumors about misused grants or donations, but a lot of creepy comments about management behavior in and around numfocus / anaconda / etc.
- murphy214 7y ago
  links/sources please? Interesting to say the last
coldtea 7y ago
>He was deluged with donations from both individuals and large companies like Microsoft, Google, Slack, etc., and the fundraiser total quickly reached ~$30k. Off topic, but the total looks disgustingly low, if companies like Microsoft, Google, and Slack have donated. Shame on them, they could splurge some more for the FOSS they use... >On March 15 2018, he contacted me to talk about the fundraiser. He told me he was uncertain what to do with this amount of money – he said his original goal was just to raise $5k to buy a computer. Privately, I was skeptical that the $5k computer had anything to do with Requests. Requests is a small pure-Python library; if you want to work on it, then any cheap laptop is more than sufficient. $5k is the price of a beefy server or top-end gaming rig. But I figured that even if he spent $5k of the money on some unrelated computer, we could call that compensation for his past work, and it would still leave ~$25k to fulfill the promises he'd made in the fundraiser. And this was clearly a great opportunity to build some amazing new stuff. So I didn't say anything about the computer. Until here, and if it's his project/fundraiser, it's his call. He could have spent it all on blow, and as long as he delivers the end result he raised funds for, it would be totally fine. What he actually did in the end however (not work at all for the project and expect the volunteer to do it for free while he kept all the money) is a no go...

stinos 7y ago

No :) I'm well aware a suboptimal repository commit history hygiene doesn't necessarily correlate with the actual code quality, but yeah this really doesn't look nice nor convenient to work with. I wonder e.g. what the reason is behind pushing a hundred tiny updates to the README in one day, to master?

lovetocode 7y ago
They are updating the README files through the github web interface and saving as they update each section.
- Avamander 7y ago
  Why not make all the edits in one pass? It just looks horrendous. I wonder though, is there a git history fixer out there somewhere that rewrites history to merge commits with the same message into one?
  - _-___________-_ 7y ago
    `git rebase -i` and then change `pick` to `squash` for the ones you want squashed, but if you’ve pushed all the commits to master you’re now going to have to force-push master, which is... sub-optimal.
    - Avamander 7y ago
      Nah, rebase is too slow on large histories and it might not be your own commit which complicates things.
      - marble-drink 7y ago
        No it isn't. Are you thinking about filter-branch?
        Avamander 7y ago

_-___________-_ 7y ago

Not nearly as troubling, but I also had a giggle at this (from README.md): > You may certianly put your trust in this code.

holmb 7y ago

Downgraded from "You can trust this code" to "You may certianly put your trust in this code" in https://github.com/psf/requests/commit/9d4fd3c968b134d98ed2789cfb376e0237cfd047 https://github.com/psf/requests/commit/9d4fd3c968b134d98ed27...

dessant 7y ago
By browsing the commit history it becomes clear that the PSF must revoke Kenneth's push access to preserve the integrity of the project.
- earthboundkid 7y ago
  That feels harsh, but honestly, I think it doesn't make sense for him to have control of master. Let him make branches and do PRs like everyone else. Obviously we know that when he's in the right frame of mind he's a good coder, but when he's not he can easily break master for a hugely popular piece of infrastructure. It doesn't play to his strengths to make him the controller of master.

marble-drink 7y ago

Wow, that's awful. I've never seen a production project where a developer is allowed to push hundreds of pointless commits directly to master.

DarkCrusader2 7y ago

Oh my, last 100 or so commits are mostly just Update README.md.

philwelch 7y ago
Primarily to add   all over the place.

coldtea 7y ago

Looks like what? Seems like just a recent bunch of many fine grained edits to the README... This however, from TFA, is troubling: I think a lot of people don't realize how little Reitz actually has to do with Requests development. For many years now, actual maintenance has been done almost exclusively by other volunteers. If you look at the maintainers list on PyPI, you'll see he doesn't have PyPI rights to his own project, because he kept breaking stuff, so the real maintainers insisted on revoking his access. If you clone the Requests git repo, you can run git log requests/ to see a list of every time someone changed the library's source code, either directly or by merging someone else's pull request. The last time Reitz did either was in May 2017, when he made some whitespace cleanups. At least as far as commits go, his main contributions since then appear to consist of merging some small doc fixes, and monetizing the project by adding donation links, ads, intrusive sponsored links, etc. All of this money goes directly into his pocket, not the project's maintainers.

mrfusion 7y ago

What’s wrong with it?