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Being more specific would give away my identity, but this is one issue I ran into while moving from i3 to sway: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/1005#issu

Being more specific would give away my identity, but this is one issue I ran into while moving from i3 to sway: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/1005#issuecomment-331526652 https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/1005#issuecomment-3315... where the comment that closes the issue just says "we'll never implement this, issue closed". I sympathize with you in that, if you had little time and other things to attend to, then just closing an issue is an instant reward of having something less to do. But I think it would have been better to, first, don't do anything about that issue if you didn't had the time to do it properly (even if you were the one that filled the issue!), which would have been to write down the rationale why you think that feature is not worth its tradeoffs, and also, to have let other users speak up their mind, and see what others think, before making a decision. For me, that difference in "project culture" is the difference between an open source project that's worth contributing to, and one that is not. I've grown a couple of very large open source projects, and some of them I look at once a year, and they keep growing with dozens of PRs per week or day! The main reason I am able to just move on to other things is because I've grown and mentor the new maintainers and leaders of these projects , and I know they both carefully listen to the projects users, and are able to grow new contributors, just like I did.

ddevault 6y ago
This was 3 years ago. I usually treat these issues a bit better these days. However... I disagree with your suggestions about how to go about this better. You're still coming from a place where all paths lead to the implementation and inclusion of the feature. We will say "no" sometimes, and there's no amount of discussion which is going to change that. We're volunteers with a limited amount of time, why should we lead everyone on by entertaining a fruitless discussion in on a feature for which we have no interest in supporting? There's a lot of discussion you don't see, too. Discussion on the IRC channel, private discussions between maintainers, snippets here and there on patch reviews and other issues... just because you didn't get your say, doesn't mean that the issue wasn't sufficiently discussed. At some point I just don't want to discuss it any more. I could redirect you to /dev/null and let you say your fill, but I don't think that's fair to you, either. You can't always get what you want, and if I don't always give you what you want, that doesn't make me a bad maintainer IMO.
- fluffything 6y ago
  > You're still coming from a place where all paths lead to the implementation and inclusion of the feature. Not really. Ideally, I'd have read a comment saying: "We discussed this on IRC, and for this and that reason, we decided that this is probably never going to be worth doing. If you have any new information or argument that was not considered above, please do raise it with us, but we are closing this issue for now." > There's a lot of discussion you don't see, too. Discussion on the IRC channel, private discussions between maintainers, snippets here and there on patch reviews and other issues... just because you didn't get your say, doesn't mean that the issue wasn't sufficiently discussed. If your discussions don't happen in the open, how open is your open source project really? You can discuss things on IRC, or whatsapp, or wherever you want, but if a synchronous and/or private communication channel is used to decide on technical issues that impact the project, then you are essentially excluding everyone that doesn't live in your same time-zone, wasn't there on IRC at that time, can't search those IRC logs, wasn't invited in the room, etc. from impacting your project. That's just not open enough for me, so I don't contribute to projects that work like that. Rust or th linux kernel discuss everything in the open, so that everyone can see it and participate, whenever they have time to, and make their case. Whether that's a mailing list, a forum, or a github issue doesn't matter. But closing an issue with "no" isn't very helpful for all those users that weren't in the room where that was decided, and they will all wonder "why". > that doesn't make me a bad maintainer IMO. There are dozens of different ways of maintaining open source projects. Just because sway's way doesn't fit me doesn't mean it's bad. It just means that it doesn't fit me. If you'd like to change something so that it fits people like me, the above hopefully explains what the issues for me were. But I don't expect you to do that, and you don't have to do that, and its perfectly fine for you to disagree and don't want to do that.
  - ddevault 6y ago
    Our IRC channel is open, and many people watch and participate in discussions there. Many of our contributors and maintainers are also friends, people we ping for advice on unrelated things, and so on, and sometimes discussions happen incidentally. We don't go out of our way to conduct discussions in private, and we make our primary communication mediums available to the public. Just because you don't like IRC doesn't make it less open. If you ask for more details, we will also often entertain your question, especially in the context of "I want to know so I can write a patch". But if you're just another grumpy user bringing their bat up for a swing at the dead horse, then no, we're not going to entertain you. We're human beings, and we acknowledge that. I don't go out of my way to try and build a community which avoids that fact. Treat us like human beings, people with feelings and knowledge and a limited amount of time. You didn't pay for it, so you're not entitled to support, features, or yes, even explanations of why decisions were made. It's a collaborative effort, run by volunteers, who can stop volunteering whenever they want. Some users get burned by this, but contributors don't, and contributors are more important than users. Sway is not some abstract concept of a project - it's made out of people. I know this doesn't directly address many of your comments, but I feel that it hits on a deeper and more important difference in our beliefs. User entitlement is a huge problem in open source, and it burns out maintainers faster than anything else. I don't stand for it.

ddevault 6y ago

This was 3 years ago. I usually treat these issues a bit better these days. However... I disagree with your suggestions about how to go about this better. You're still coming from a place where all paths lead to the implementation and inclusion of the feature. We will say "no" sometimes, and there's no amount of discussion which is going to change that. We're volunteers with a limited amount of time, why should we lead everyone on by entertaining a fruitless discussion in on a feature for which we have no interest in supporting? There's a lot of discussion you don't see, too. Discussion on the IRC channel, private discussions between maintainers, snippets here and there on patch reviews and other issues... just because you didn't get your say, doesn't mean that the issue wasn't sufficiently discussed. At some point I just don't want to discuss it any more. I could redirect you to /dev/null and let you say your fill, but I don't think that's fair to you, either. You can't always get what you want, and if I don't always give you what you want, that doesn't make me a bad maintainer IMO.

fluffything 6y ago
> You're still coming from a place where all paths lead to the implementation and inclusion of the feature. Not really. Ideally, I'd have read a comment saying: "We discussed this on IRC, and for this and that reason, we decided that this is probably never going to be worth doing. If you have any new information or argument that was not considered above, please do raise it with us, but we are closing this issue for now." > There's a lot of discussion you don't see, too. Discussion on the IRC channel, private discussions between maintainers, snippets here and there on patch reviews and other issues... just because you didn't get your say, doesn't mean that the issue wasn't sufficiently discussed. If your discussions don't happen in the open, how open is your open source project really? You can discuss things on IRC, or whatsapp, or wherever you want, but if a synchronous and/or private communication channel is used to decide on technical issues that impact the project, then you are essentially excluding everyone that doesn't live in your same time-zone, wasn't there on IRC at that time, can't search those IRC logs, wasn't invited in the room, etc. from impacting your project. That's just not open enough for me, so I don't contribute to projects that work like that. Rust or th linux kernel discuss everything in the open, so that everyone can see it and participate, whenever they have time to, and make their case. Whether that's a mailing list, a forum, or a github issue doesn't matter. But closing an issue with "no" isn't very helpful for all those users that weren't in the room where that was decided, and they will all wonder "why". > that doesn't make me a bad maintainer IMO. There are dozens of different ways of maintaining open source projects. Just because sway's way doesn't fit me doesn't mean it's bad. It just means that it doesn't fit me. If you'd like to change something so that it fits people like me, the above hopefully explains what the issues for me were. But I don't expect you to do that, and you don't have to do that, and its perfectly fine for you to disagree and don't want to do that.
- ddevault 6y ago
  Our IRC channel is open, and many people watch and participate in discussions there. Many of our contributors and maintainers are also friends, people we ping for advice on unrelated things, and so on, and sometimes discussions happen incidentally. We don't go out of our way to conduct discussions in private, and we make our primary communication mediums available to the public. Just because you don't like IRC doesn't make it less open. If you ask for more details, we will also often entertain your question, especially in the context of "I want to know so I can write a patch". But if you're just another grumpy user bringing their bat up for a swing at the dead horse, then no, we're not going to entertain you. We're human beings, and we acknowledge that. I don't go out of my way to try and build a community which avoids that fact. Treat us like human beings, people with feelings and knowledge and a limited amount of time. You didn't pay for it, so you're not entitled to support, features, or yes, even explanations of why decisions were made. It's a collaborative effort, run by volunteers, who can stop volunteering whenever they want. Some users get burned by this, but contributors don't, and contributors are more important than users. Sway is not some abstract concept of a project - it's made out of people. I know this doesn't directly address many of your comments, but I feel that it hits on a deeper and more important difference in our beliefs. User entitlement is a huge problem in open source, and it burns out maintainers faster than anything else. I don't stand for it.