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Connecting qualified would-be maintainers with projects looking for a maintainer is a tricky problem. Who here even knew PCRE2 was looking for a new maintainer?

by arp242 2y ago

Connecting qualified would-be maintainers with projects looking for a maintainer is a tricky problem. Who here even knew PCRE2 was looking for a new maintainer? I took over some fairly widely used Go projects, but only after they were archived. I had no idea they were looking for someone to maintain it. There's a bit of a catch-22 here: - If a project is already well-maintained then no one really needs to contribute anything. - If a project is poorly maintained due to lack of interest or time, then this will also discourage contributions – the first think I check before contributing is whether previous PRs are actually getting merged. For larger projects where there's always something to do, like Exim, this usually isn't a big issue. But for smaller more narrowly scoped projects like PCRE2 this is more of an issue. I'm not surprised he's having a harder time with PCRE2.

fanf2 2y ago
There’s a PCRE2 issue that Philip created last week, and which I submitted here, but it didn’t get much traction. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40657607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40657607 This LWN article is helping to spread the word. (I worked with Philip before he retired.)
- arp242 2y ago
  Yeah, that's exactly the kind of stuff very few people are going to see. Even this HN post here is seen by relatively few people. Also, about 90% of the people respond will fall through. I'm sure people say "yes" with the best of intentions, but saying "yes" in a wave of enthusiasm is easy, and then spending a lot of hours on it ... not so much. My favourite example is someone who said "yes, I'll help maintain", was added to the GitHub repo, made a new issue with a long plan on how to deal with the many open issues, and ... was never seen again. Never actually dealt with any of the open issues. I'm sure this was done with the best of intentions (and their profile said they're a student, so I don't want to judge harshly), but this was a rather marked example that made me laugh.
apitman 2y ago
I worry about new maintainers who feel the need to leave some sort of a mark on projects by adding unnecessary features and dependencies. I get it, true maintenance of a stable project, where you only fix bugs and security issues, is not glamorous. It's a tired meme but we really do need some concept of "finished" in our field, along with the necessary incentive structures to enable people to do the needed maintenance on finished software in perpetuity.
- dingnuts 2y ago
  isn't the whole point of intellectual property law to align incentives? it's no coincidence that corporations that own proprietary code don't have this problem. has anybody considered that maybe Richard Stallman was wrong? maybe it ISN'T a good idea to volunteer your time to write libraries that corporations will use to make billions, while begging for donations. maybe, sometimes, libre licensing is a mistake specifically because it leaves maintainers with no reasonable avenue for compensation
  - apitman 2y ago
    These are definitely questions worth considering. > it's no coincidence that corporations that own proprietary code don't have this problem. I would argue they have a similar but worse problem. Someone at google creates an awesome product. They get promoted and leave the project. Someone else is assigned to maintain the product, which slowly gets worse over time either a) because the new maintainers are less skilled/driven or b) because programmers perceive themselves as being paid to write code, and it's fun, so they're going to change things even if nothing needs to be changed. I've seen so much commercial software get worse over time. I'm not sure if I have the causes right, but there's definitely something wrong with the model. In contrast, I've found open source software to be far better for far longer. It might stop being maintained, but it almost never gets worse in my experience.
  - notRobot 2y ago
    Surely that's a decision to be made by the author(s) of the code? There is no objective "right" or "wrong" when it comes to libre. I have written dozens of libre projects. I don't want them to be proprietary. I don't want to make money from them. If I did, I'd simply use a proprietary licence, no one forced me to go libre.
ajkjk 2y ago
Seems like it would be a great feature on github, or for a standalone site, if a critical mass of usage could be reached and the site was trustworthy (i.e. not trying to monetize the information somehow).
jdonaldson 2y ago
PCRE2 is specified through its implementation, which has so many edge cases and special flags that most people can't reason about what kinds of problems it could cause. I really wish more people used PEG parsing. I wrote a library for it in Haxe that was surprisingly fast despite being interpreted : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtNQvjyioGQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtNQvjyioGQ
- nextaccountic 2y ago
  Aren't there reimplementations of pcre2? I think that ripgrep has a pcre2 flag or something
  - burntsushi 2y ago
    ripgrep uses the PCRE2 library directly. Otherwise ripgrep is "pure" Rust. (To the extent that is plausible at present. e.g., ripgrep relies on libc indirectly via Rust's standard library.)

saurik 2y ago

> has anybody considered that maybe Richard Stallman was wrong? > maybe it ISN'T a good idea to volunteer your time to write libraries that corporations will use to make billions... If you are writing libraries that are being used by companies as part of proprietary software at all -- much less to make billions -- then you didn't pay attention to Richard Stallman. > isn't the whole point of intellectual property law to align incentives? Yes: which is why Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation specifically came up with a model which uses copyright law against proprietary software via the idea of "copyleft". I think there are people out there who fundamentally believe in doing service for other people... as long as they aren't taken advantage of! Aligning this incentive by encoding this moral contract into a civil one is the goal of the FSF. (Now, I won't say they nailed it... GPL2 failed to foresee and prevent DRM, and even GPL3 has issues with the new era of cloud hosting; but like, they did much better than anyone probably should have expected.) Contrary to the title of this LWN post, PCRE2 is not "Free Software" and is actually licensed under BSD; the result is that, yes: a ton of companies use this library and they make billions.

lcouturi 2y ago
Permissively licensed software is still free software. The BSD licenses are approved by the FSF as free software licenses. They're simply not copyleft.
- grotorea 2y ago
  Yes but what I think previous poster meant is that you can't use a permissive license and then blame RMS when you feel used by a corporation using it to make proprietary software. edit: because RMS/FSF's position is not simply "all free software equally good and you should spend your time building some with any license"
  - saurik 2y ago
    (FWIW, I was also trying to add a charitable shift of blame to the article title making the matter more confusing by invoking the term Free Software; but, icouturi's correction of that little quip I added--which was entirely ancillary to my overall argument, as you point out--is, in fact, correct.
moomin 2y ago
It might be more accurate to say that ESR was wrong. It might be even more accurate to say that ESR regards the obvious deficiencies of the model he popularised to be features.

arp242 2y ago

There are very few non-trivial projects that are truly "finished" in the sense of "will never need any changes". There's always bugs, there's always a changing ecosystem (even for C), and for many projects once in a while you do want some new features. For example a new feature added last month is the new pcre2_set_max_pattern_compiled_length() function, to limit the size of compiled patterns. I assume that wasn't added for the craic but in response to a real-world use case. There are also plenty of bugfixes and smaller changes.

apitman 2y ago
If you read my second sentence above, I think we're in almost perfect agreement. Unless I'm misunderstanding you? My definition of "finished" includes provisions for bug fixes and important features.
fragmede 2y ago
"finished" as in "totally free from bugs" is one thing, "finished" as in "feature complete and passes all known test cases, artificial and real world, known at the time" is another. As an industry we need to push the second notion as something someone can build and then set down. building a bridge instead of a steam engine locomotive. a bridge needs some maintenance and upkeep, yes, but after it's built, the team that built it moves on to another project. To contrast, a steam engine locomotor is an ongoing engineering project, which requires constant upkeep to keep the train moving. A SaaS company's backend is a steam engine. The Unix util "ls" is a bridge.
- mjcohen 2y ago
  I think that's a poor example because bridges wear out and need to be maintained. There are a number of Youtubers devoted to disasters (One is "Plainly Difficult") and bridge failures are a large component of their examples.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    I don't see how that undermines my point. Everything needs maintenance and upkeep. You have to re-paint the bridge and check it for cracks and do testing on it. But that's measured in days/weeks/months/years vs. a steam engine going off the rails in seconds/minutes/hours. In my comment I stated: > a bridge needs some maintenance and upkeep, yes, Is there a way I could have stated that to emphasize that bridges will fail if they're not maintained?