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I think you point it out well. Users have no business complaining because you won't add some feature they came up with. What if that feature is something the us

I think you point it out well. Users have no business complaining because you won't add some feature they came up with. What if that feature is something the user believes is very important to the software, but you think it's a complete waste of your time to even bother to add or maintain it? That's what this whole Capistrano situation seems like to me (sadly, I didn't even think cap worked on windows). People are irate because a project is dropping support for a platform it never seemed to work well on to begin with. Have the developers ever promised windows support? I always thought their main claim was that it's a tool to automate deploying (mostly rails) apps, and I think it works well in that regard. I didn't think those promises extended to platform support as well.

extension 18y ago
Given the informal nature of software development, there are going to be a lot of grey areas when it comes to implicit standards and best practices. But it's the principle that matters. Some people believe that open source can do no wrong. I think that belittles open source. As for this case.. well, Capistrano is a Ruby lib and Ruby libs tend to work on any platform Ruby does, unless otherwise specified. Plus, it used to be supported, which means people invested their time, thinking it would continue to be. It's a weak complaint but it deserves at least a little recognition. But the attitude bothers me more than the action. Read that message again and then look at this sunshine enema: http://www.capify.org/ http://www.capify.org/ Can you put that site online and then claim you're not beholden to anyone? Questionable.
- silencio 18y ago
  Maybe this is a difference in expectations, but I don't expect a platform to be supported forever, nor do I expect support for a platform when not specified, by anyone. When I looked at the "sunshine enema", I saw a tool for a specific purpose and not much else, certainly not anything about what platform the tool supported which could wait until I read the install/download pages. What I read in the message was someone who was stuck doing something he didn't like, and he was asking for people to do precisely what he did with Capistrano: step up and scratch their own itches, something further helped by Capistrano being an open source project with a current release that still works fine with Windows. I didn't see someone who should have been beholden to anyone otherwise. I also don't see that as an OSS project doing wrong, I think it's reasonable given the situation and this certainly does not have to end here in this way. For what it's worth, what would bother me is if this wasn't explicitly announced and the dev just didn't feel like working on the project anymore, or if it was a core feature of the tool that was going to be ignored in the future. Now that's something to complain about, and then go do something about if it mattered that much to me. I've personally been in a similar hellhole of a situation (who hasn't?) doing some dev work for a nonprofit where less than 5% of the users both by number and usage completely wasted my time trying to convince me I should bring back support of older browsers and platforms for absolutely no legitimate reason other than a lack of willingness to upgrade on their part, even though the nonprofit had existing volume and discounted licenses that would effectively make the software free for them. Make a lazy <5% happy by doing LOTS of extra work possibly eschewing working on features for the other >95%, and still deliver what may be a subpar experience (think windows 98 when everyone else is running Vista) while billing them for it at the same time? No thank you.

extension 18y ago

Given the informal nature of software development, there are going to be a lot of grey areas when it comes to implicit standards and best practices. But it's the principle that matters. Some people believe that open source can do no wrong. I think that belittles open source. As for this case.. well, Capistrano is a Ruby lib and Ruby libs tend to work on any platform Ruby does, unless otherwise specified. Plus, it used to be supported, which means people invested their time, thinking it would continue to be. It's a weak complaint but it deserves at least a little recognition. But the attitude bothers me more than the action. Read that message again and then look at this sunshine enema: http://www.capify.org/ http://www.capify.org/ Can you put that site online and then claim you're not beholden to anyone? Questionable.

silencio 18y ago
Maybe this is a difference in expectations, but I don't expect a platform to be supported forever, nor do I expect support for a platform when not specified, by anyone. When I looked at the "sunshine enema", I saw a tool for a specific purpose and not much else, certainly not anything about what platform the tool supported which could wait until I read the install/download pages. What I read in the message was someone who was stuck doing something he didn't like, and he was asking for people to do precisely what he did with Capistrano: step up and scratch their own itches, something further helped by Capistrano being an open source project with a current release that still works fine with Windows. I didn't see someone who should have been beholden to anyone otherwise. I also don't see that as an OSS project doing wrong, I think it's reasonable given the situation and this certainly does not have to end here in this way. For what it's worth, what would bother me is if this wasn't explicitly announced and the dev just didn't feel like working on the project anymore, or if it was a core feature of the tool that was going to be ignored in the future. Now that's something to complain about, and then go do something about if it mattered that much to me. I've personally been in a similar hellhole of a situation (who hasn't?) doing some dev work for a nonprofit where less than 5% of the users both by number and usage completely wasted my time trying to convince me I should bring back support of older browsers and platforms for absolutely no legitimate reason other than a lack of willingness to upgrade on their part, even though the nonprofit had existing volume and discounted licenses that would effectively make the software free for them. Make a lazy <5% happy by doing LOTS of extra work possibly eschewing working on features for the other >95%, and still deliver what may be a subpar experience (think windows 98 when everyone else is running Vista) while billing them for it at the same time? No thank you.