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The most prolific packager for Alpine Linux is stepping away
- pcdoodle 3y agodoes that mean it's getting apt-get? A big win in my opinion, i can only remember so many cooky terminal commands.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoWhy would a person stopping making packages lead you to conclude that they would replace the package manager?
- mmastrac 3y agoThe blessing and curse of having a prolific contributor (mostly the former). The trick is to manage burnout and figuring out continuity for these individuals to avoid massive upset in the open-source project if they decide to move on or take an extended break.
- phkahler 3y ago>> The trick is to manage burnout and figuring out continuity for these individuals to avoid massive upset in the open-source project if they decide to move on or take an extended break. Another good trick would be to get more maintainers. If a bunch of people would just handle one package each...
- mmastrac 3y agoIf it was easy to get more volunteer maintainers, a lot of open-source projects would be very happy. :)
- derealized 3y agoI've been in this situation at a couple of companies. Very prolific in the first year, only to burn out. At my new job, I'm taking it easy.
- agumonkey 3y agowhat was your motivation ? and what changed ? I like high output in jobs, it's tiresome at times but makes me tired is lack of freedom and lack of surroundings. You'd like to organize things to promote speed and quality but some companies don't care. Good colleague will allow you to find better ideas, bad colleague will make you regress.
- derealized 3y agoI have intrisic motivation, I just like what I work with and like to do a good job. I often have high standards for my work. What changed? It's very tiresome to swim against the current. You can only care about so many things that your team doesn't until you get tired of barking at the tree. At my new job it's the same, as usual, but I'm not forcing things and just getting with the flow. If I can, I'll suggest some ocasional improvements but if it falls on deaf ears, I'll let it go.
- automatoney 3y agoThis is so relatable. I was looking forward to working on projects that I cared about more, but then when I got there I realized how much energy actually caring takes. Especially in terms of emotional investment - I've decided to save my passion more for personal projects instead of spending it all where it won't necessarily go anywhere.
- raybb 3y agoAt those jobs were you working on OSS? Curious how OSS maintainers that aren't at big companies find community and talk to each other.
- 3y ago
- oneshtein 3y ago- It's time for AI to replace the maintainer! - But AI costs money to run, while maintainers are working for free...
- phkahler 3y agoThen we'd need someone to maintain the AI.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoWho then would maintain the AI maintainer? And who maintains the AI maintainer maintainer?
- seeknotfind 3y ago[flagged]
- alias_neo 3y agoIt may have been a poor choice of words intended to suggest she was "relinquishing privileges". It's good operational and operational-security practice to ensure people don't have access to things they don't need when they no longer need them. When I put a request in to access production to debug something, I immediately relinquish that access by way of removing my privileges, or asking operations to do so, as soon as I'm done with the task at hand.
- wpietri 3y agoIt might have been. But but the other factors make me take it at face value. In each of the last 3 quarters, psykose had more commits than everybody else put together. Going from that to doing zero while saying she needs to sleep for a year, plus specifically dropping mantainership of everything is not just putting away a tool you don't need for the moment. It's locking in a major lifestyle change.
- Ensorceled 3y agoPossibly, but also unhelpful and irrelevant.
- seeknotfind 3y agoHmm. Well I'm surprised to hear this actually. Figure I'll reply here. I work on a lot of open source projects and have done authorship analysis, and they do tend to follow a power distribution. The thing is, I'm one of those authors that loves to make a bunch of changes. Fix this, fix that. I'll throw up a commit before I'll send an email about it. I love fixing things. I consider myself a programmer through and through. When I entered management, I don't get that "fix" at work, so I might code 9hr on a Saturday building something fun. I've always viewed it as a good thing. An escape, a joy, cathartic, and pleasurable. Perhaps sometimes, it's gone too far. I left a birthday party last summer to go back and code. Though, you see, I'm also trying to build something, to do something. So to see the full blown addiction behavior. It's like looking over the edge of a cliff. I don't think I would go that far, but for me the most important takeaway from the article was this too can be an addiction.
- doctorpangloss 3y ago[flagged]
- cocacola1 3y agoThat was fun to sing along to.
- nazgulsenpai 3y agoUpvoted for rhyming. But to your comment, I'm sure Alpine will be fine. Just might be slightly behind while other maintainers pick up the slack.
- hackermeows 3y agoTotally not written by an AI
- glckr 3y agoIt's a reference to Hamilton. Definitely reads like nonsense without the context, though...
- mrweasel 3y agoThis always fascinating to see a person that maintains a ton of package, knowing full well that there is no way that they actively use all that software themselves. At the same time there are millions of us that just expects a package to be available, but never think to offer to at least help maintain a something. Frequently it's not even that hard, sure there are a few specialized packages which require more skills, but packaging up a Python library is something most of us could easily do. Generally all of us needs to be better at pitching in where we can and not be depended on a few people overworking themselves.
- 5e92cb50239222b 3y agoI don't know about Alpine specifically, but many distributions put a lot of red tape around becoming a maintainer (for good reasons). I just don't want to get into it. AUR from Arch Linux has an interesting take on this — anyone can become a maintainer in a matter of minutes — and while that results in some low-quality packages and the expectation that you're supposed to review everything you install (which is easy though thanks to the excellent package format, which Alpine also uses with minor modifications), most of them are fine, and AUR gets a lot more maintainers than any other distribution. You also don't put any obligations on yourself by becoming a maintainer on AUR — you can always orphan a package in less than a minute, no questions asked. Some users actually place new packages on AUR and orphan them right away. If it's of any use, it usually get a volunteer maintainer within a few days.
- fluix 3y agoI've found packaging for Alpine has been similarly easy. There is a review process in the sense that you file an MR instead of committing directly, but my experience has been really quick and easy. Also, not everyone with commit access does this, but psykose would also fix minor issues like indentation without requesting changes and doing the whole back and forth. I really appreciated it and noticed the changes for next time. The community and main repositories have some stability guarantees but that doesn't stop you from orphaning the package.
- freedomben 3y ago
- pmontra 3y agoCongratulations for all those packages and best wishes for catching up that year of sleep.
- throwawaaarrgh 3y agoAlpine's community has always seemed kind of "slap this together" combined with "figure it out yourself". I remember trying to contribute and it being a pain. Advice to the maintainers: spend a month or two finding ways to make it easier for us to contribute, and we will.
- fluix 3y agoCould you describe what you found difficult? I'm pretty new to packaging on Alpine, but found it to be easy to get into, only requiring a bit more effort than the AUR.
- copperbrick25 3y agoWhat issues exactly did you have with contributing? I found it very easy to contribute to alpine, I wrote an APKBUILD, created a pull request, someone reviewed my PR and pointed out an issue, I fixed it and my PR was merged. I can't think of a way that could be made any easier.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoSounds like all the release engineering rigor of a 1 man, DIY hobby out for the path of least resistance. One person trying to do too much is no bueno. It needs to be a team effort and consumers need to step-up to be occasional producers as well.
- salawat 3y agoCounterpoint: No system built by committee will ever be trivially reckonable/navigable by a single person. Therefore the only people who will derive benefit from it will mostly be committees/orgs. When one builds for oneself, or a single person, one builds under a set of constraints that truly allow for peak accessibility. You've only got 1 person to do the whole shebang. And if one person can do it, you're on a much better footing from which to then allow anyone to do it. As someone in the midst of building out a lab, it's been humbling, and in a way invigorating to return to grappling with building cohesive, single operator systems.
- LAC-Tech 3y agoI use alpine and on my desktop and I've seen that handle so much! Thanks for all your hard work, if you ever read this. As an aside, I really should learn how to package stuff for alpine.
- daniel-thompson 3y ago13K commits over the past year works out to almost 40 commits per day. Curious what the workflow is to accomplish that and the nature of the commits. Irrespective of that, that is super intense, sounds like she's getting a well-deserved rest.