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I've been on both ends of this. People who aren't paying me for code are upset that I'm not providing an endless stream of useless stuff; and code I rely on is

by cowsup 3y ago

I've been on both ends of this. People who aren't paying me for code are upset that I'm not providing an endless stream of useless stuff; and code I rely on is seemingly abandoned and I'm cautious before using it. The polite thing to do is to check in on the status, in a public setting, and get an answer from the maintainer, which is what this person is doing. Yes, it's entirely possible that there's nothing new to add to it, and it's "done." But what if there is somehow some sort of major change to OpenAI's API, or they deprecate [current API version] and you're expected to migrate to a new one? Or, worse still, a major exploit is found? These are valid concerns that even free users would want to know, and the best way to do that is to check the pulse of the project. The person in the screenshot made extra care to be polite about asking, and they're now being put on blast for it. Also worth mentioning is the user who commented saying there are "relevant and important" PRs and issues that haven't been addressed over the last year. Whether they're relevant and important, I don't know, based off my experience I'll say likely not... But the fact that you're allowing irrelevant and non-important things to go stale, without closing them, only lends credence to the possibility that the project is abandoned and, if something were to go wrong in the future, nobody would be around to fix it. Also, your statement that they're offering to fork it as a "threat" against your project is not at all what is going on. If your project got forked with reason "original was abandoned," I think you'd be even more frustrated than you are now. They asked what the status was before putting in the work to fork it and attempt to move users away from your project. That is a courtesy notice, not a threat, designed to save everyone time and frustration. It is a good thing for someone's open-source code to have interest by the community, and for users to want to use it. Getting angry at those same users for checking on the status won't do any good.

minimaxir 3y ago
> But what if there is somehow some sort of major change to OpenAI's API, or they deprecate [current API version] and you're expected to migrate to a new one? Or, worse still, a major exploit is found? The more constructive open source move would be to file an issue explicitly noting "the upstream dependency may breaksand there will need to be changes to accomidate it" or "there is a zero-day that needs to be fixed ASAP" instead of "is this repo dead." In the former case, others will have more information and it saves the maintainers time. Many of my other projects have had people do that and I've been very greatful. > The person in the screenshot made extra care to be polite about asking, and they're now being put on blast for it. "What's the status of development?" or "Will this incorporate X feature coming up?" is polite and gives enough information on aliveness. The comment I screenshotted is passive-aggressive at best, and there's no really good way to ask "is this repo dead" without being passive-aggressive. My day-to-day job that actually pays me a salary wouldn't ever provide a bulleted list of the reasons I suck, let alone a project I develop in my spare time. If I mass close stale unimportant issues/PRs the argument would then be "you don't want issues/PRs so no reason to contribute." Lose-lose situation. > Also, your statement that they're offering to fork it as a "threat" against your project is not at all what is going on. If your project got forked with reason "original was abandoned," I think you'd be even more frustrated than you are now. I would definitely not be frustrated (assuming that they give proper license/credit to the source code which is a different issue) The fork comment wasn't directly related to the screenshot, but was a part of other discussions over the years where people say "I'd use a fork but the forks aren't as popular" which becomes an annoying Catch-22.
- shaftway 3y ago
  > The comment I screenshotted is passive-aggressive at best It's polite and it asks questions that are very pertinent, given how you claim to manage your repos. > How can the community support? I've been involved in a project that accepted drive-by PRs and I get that that sucks. You know what helped? People who asked how they could tick something off my personal todo list before they tried to crowbar their pet feature in. > Can we expect development by the maintainer? > Are you open to PRs and reviewing them? > What's your time commitment? > Should someone just fork the repo? All of these questions really just ask the same one: should I fork your repo if I want to make a change. Your very next point discusses a repo where you don't accept PRs, don't reply to issues, but also refuse to say it's not being "developed". You literally ask for PRs in the README.md, but then ignore them? Are people supposed to figure out that you think it's perfect as-is and doesn't need more input in contradiction to that?. All of the questions other than #2 are literally just trying to get you to put that in writing. Forks suck. There's no if's, and's, or but's. At best the original project is dead and the fork goes on to be kind of a successor. But it never really will be, because 90% of people will stay on the original, 5% of people will move to the fork, 18% of people will post on both repos about how it's unclear which one they should use, and 7% of people will post on the new repo threatening to sue because they found a similar-sounding project in some disclosure and they don't agree to your imaginary terms that allow you to sell their private info to the Illuminati. But the worst is when the original project isn't dead. You go and do a significant amount of work to fork it, and then the original author comes back with some pretty major changes that completely break the foundation of your fork. Now you're stuck on a legacy fork, or a ton of work to rebase onto the core library. If other people are depending on your fork that's a difficult question to answer. This email is basically asking "should I go and do all of that work?" in as polite a way as possible. If you put together a canned response (cough CONTRIBUTING.md cough) that would solve 100% of this: > Thanks for your interest in contributing. I think this project is pretty complete as-is. If there are breaking changes or zero-days that come up, I plan on fixing them. Otherwise I don't expect to approve many PRs. If you feel you need to get a change in, feel free to fork the repository and make your change there.
  - kelsey9876543 3y ago

by cowsup 3y ago

minimaxir 3y ago

> But what if there is somehow some sort of major change to OpenAI's API, or they deprecate [current API version] and you're expected to migrate to a new one? Or, worse still, a major exploit is found? The more constructive open source move would be to file an issue explicitly noting "the upstream dependency may breaksand there will need to be changes to accomidate it" or "there is a zero-day that needs to be fixed ASAP" instead of "is this repo dead." In the former case, others will have more information and it saves the maintainers time. Many of my other projects have had people do that and I've been very greatful. > The person in the screenshot made extra care to be polite about asking, and they're now being put on blast for it. "What's the status of development?" or "Will this incorporate X feature coming up?" is polite and gives enough information on aliveness. The comment I screenshotted is passive-aggressive at best, and there's no really good way to ask "is this repo dead" without being passive-aggressive. My day-to-day job that actually pays me a salary wouldn't ever provide a bulleted list of the reasons I suck, let alone a project I develop in my spare time. If I mass close stale unimportant issues/PRs the argument would then be "you don't want issues/PRs so no reason to contribute." Lose-lose situation. > Also, your statement that they're offering to fork it as a "threat" against your project is not at all what is going on. If your project got forked with reason "original was abandoned," I think you'd be even more frustrated than you are now. I would definitely not be frustrated (assuming that they give proper license/credit to the source code which is a different issue) The fork comment wasn't directly related to the screenshot, but was a part of other discussions over the years where people say "I'd use a fork but the forks aren't as popular" which becomes an annoying Catch-22.

shaftway 3y ago
> The comment I screenshotted is passive-aggressive at best It's polite and it asks questions that are very pertinent, given how you claim to manage your repos. > How can the community support? I've been involved in a project that accepted drive-by PRs and I get that that sucks. You know what helped? People who asked how they could tick something off my personal todo list before they tried to crowbar their pet feature in. > Can we expect development by the maintainer? > Are you open to PRs and reviewing them? > What's your time commitment? > Should someone just fork the repo? All of these questions really just ask the same one: should I fork your repo if I want to make a change. Your very next point discusses a repo where you don't accept PRs, don't reply to issues, but also refuse to say it's not being "developed". You literally ask for PRs in the README.md, but then ignore them? Are people supposed to figure out that you think it's perfect as-is and doesn't need more input in contradiction to that?. All of the questions other than #2 are literally just trying to get you to put that in writing. Forks suck. There's no if's, and's, or but's. At best the original project is dead and the fork goes on to be kind of a successor. But it never really will be, because 90% of people will stay on the original, 5% of people will move to the fork, 18% of people will post on both repos about how it's unclear which one they should use, and 7% of people will post on the new repo threatening to sue because they found a similar-sounding project in some disclosure and they don't agree to your imaginary terms that allow you to sell their private info to the Illuminati. But the worst is when the original project isn't dead. You go and do a significant amount of work to fork it, and then the original author comes back with some pretty major changes that completely break the foundation of your fork. Now you're stuck on a legacy fork, or a ton of work to rebase onto the core library. If other people are depending on your fork that's a difficult question to answer. This email is basically asking "should I go and do all of that work?" in as polite a way as possible. If you put together a canned response (cough CONTRIBUTING.md cough) that would solve 100% of this: > Thanks for your interest in contributing. I think this project is pretty complete as-is. If there are breaking changes or zero-days that come up, I plan on fixing them. Otherwise I don't expect to approve many PRs. If you feel you need to get a change in, feel free to fork the repository and make your change there.
- kelsey9876543 3y ago