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I guess open source authors can work however they wish, but the sheer disdain displayed for good-but-differing practices is depressing. So, now I'm a "kid" (wi

I guess open source authors can work however they wish, but the sheer disdain displayed for good-but-differing practices is depressing. So, now I'm a "kid" (with the obvious insinuation that I'm dumb and inexperienced) if I think maybe perhaps version control is a good idea, especially for open source projects that actually want contributions? Neat. And git is "bloatware"? Is that guy running on a Commodore 64 or something? Bizarre.

hhsnopek 12y ago
If he is running on a Commodore 64 with todays products then damn I wanna see his setup :D
sdkmvx 12y ago
What would you do if someone shows up on your mailing list and demands that you change your decade-old workflow that works fine? Weitse and others replies are not inappropriate. Some projects do not want contributors. It belongs to the maintainer. Knowing what not to put in is sometimes the best way to keep good code.
- ef4 12y ago
  > Knowing what not to put in is sometimes the best way to keep good code. What does that have to do with exposing a read only versioned history? Nobody is asking him to give the whole world commit privileges.
  - meepmorp 12y ago
    There is an existing, available source of read only versioned history, available online for anyone to see: ftp://ftp.porcupine.org/mirrors/postfix-release/index.html It's tarballs for each release, with associated patches for each release. That's a pretty complete read only versioned history. Why does it have to be a VCS?
    - ef4 12y ago
      Because that history is way too coarse to answer the kind of questions that a VCS can answer. And because they already have a VCS, and are just stubbornly unwilling to share all that useful information with the wider community.
      - meepmorp 12y ago
        What questions do you need to answer at a finer level of granularity? Is it really critical to know that someone fixed a typo in something day over day, but that the typo wasn't included in any releases? I get that this clashes with the culture you're used to working in, but I don't see where it's actually impactful in a real world sense. edit: a slight rewording
        ef4 12y ago
        I search through other people's commit histories all the time. Commit logs are by far the most thorough documentation you'll find in the typical codebase. Not for the big things that appear in changelogs, but for the little things like "why the heck does this line work that way?" Giving Weitse the benefit of the doubt, his commit logs are probably very useful indeed, and not sharing them makes the codebase that much less useful to everyone else. Edit to add: the canonical example is bisection. When something breaks, it is awesome to bisect it down to the precise change that broke it. Bisection lets you narrow the scope down to a vastly smaller problem space than a whole release would.
    - jacobgreenleaf 12y ago
      How are you going to view the diff between more than two temporally adjacent commits? Or find the commit upon which an arbitrary line of source code was added? Or x, or y, or z reasons that are so painfully easy to enumerate?
  - watson 12y ago
    I feel many people in here don't actually read the entire post. It mentions several times that there is a VCS. It even gives a link: https://github.com/vdukhovni/postfix https://github.com/vdukhovni/postfix
- jeremymcanally 12y ago
  If they don't want contributors then why take patches via email? (Unless that bit wasn't actually true)
  - jkrems 12y ago
    I understood it as: They don't want the low barrier to entry that "one-click let me hack this in the browser" a la Github enables.* E.g. they are not actively seeking to increase the number of contributors. (*) Which is awesome for many/most projects. But there a valid reasons not to want it.
kraemate 12y ago
The first poster in that thread was just asking for trouble, bringing that know-it-all attitude.
meepmorp 12y ago
> So, now I'm a "kid" (with the obvious insinuation that I'm dumb and inexperienced) if I think maybe perhaps version control is a good idea You're misreading the thread. The specific comment was: > kids these days see every software development/maintenance task as something that must get crushed under a git-shaped sledgehammer regardless of whether that's the reasonable or sensible thing to do. which is seems more like a knock against git and possibly the culture around sites like github, than against version control per se. One person in the thread does say that the author uses VCS, but doesn't make it public. The contributors to the project seem happy with the current setup and workflow, and frankly the guy who was looking for a public repository was kind of a dick about it.
dbecker 12y ago
sheer disdain displayed for good-but-differing practices is depressing. Funny you should criticize the postfix community for this. Did you see what they are responding to? Source control (SCM/VCS) is a MUST have. It's unbelievable that people just work with tarballs without proper source control. It doesn't matter which you use, but it must be available. Sending patches over email is what people did last century... I think the "kids these days" comment was in reference to someone waltzing in, contributing nothing, and demanding everything immediately be done their way.
- throwaway0010 12y ago
  Contribution is not a prerequisite for criticism. Deserved criticism, in this case.
  - bandushrew 12y ago
    VCS is being used, so the criticism is unfounded: "i would suggest that you ask questions first or be quiet the postfix author is using a VCS but he do not need to provide access to you or me " Anyone can criticise anything for any reason. Criticism is so easy to generate that it is worth absolutely nothing. The process they use works for them. I guarantee that I could come into your place of work and criticise pretty much everything you do, pointing out that there is a better way of doing it (because there will be, from some angle). This is not useful, and whether or not I am correct on any specific point it is unlikely to be well received.
    - superuser2 12y ago
      If you can come into my place of work and find out that we don't have backups, we're not hashing customer passwords, everyone is sharing a single user account, or we don't lock the doors at night, please do criticize. Rejecting widely accepted good/necessary practice like that for no apparent reason other than "it's working for us so far" is stupid, arrogant, irresponsible, and wrong. In this case, however, the criticism is unfounded because Postfix is using source control internally. Whether the system is exposed to the public is inconsequential as long as it's being used. There is no way you can spin it as anything even remotely close to okay if there was no change tracking in the Postfix project at all.
charlesism 12y ago
This is Postfix, which is older than some of you here on HN. Possibly the OP studied it when he was at college. Bearing that in mind, the tone of that email shows a total lack of respect. Write the email, fine, but word it in a manner that gives the Postfix devs the benefit of the doubt.

hhsnopek 12y ago

If he is running on a Commodore 64 with todays products then damn I wanna see his setup :D

sdkmvx 12y ago

What would you do if someone shows up on your mailing list and demands that you change your decade-old workflow that works fine? Weitse and others replies are not inappropriate. Some projects do not want contributors. It belongs to the maintainer. Knowing what not to put in is sometimes the best way to keep good code.

ef4 12y ago
> Knowing what not to put in is sometimes the best way to keep good code. What does that have to do with exposing a read only versioned history? Nobody is asking him to give the whole world commit privileges.
- meepmorp 12y ago
  There is an existing, available source of read only versioned history, available online for anyone to see: ftp://ftp.porcupine.org/mirrors/postfix-release/index.html It's tarballs for each release, with associated patches for each release. That's a pretty complete read only versioned history. Why does it have to be a VCS?
  - ef4 12y ago
    Because that history is way too coarse to answer the kind of questions that a VCS can answer. And because they already have a VCS, and are just stubbornly unwilling to share all that useful information with the wider community.
    - meepmorp 12y ago
      What questions do you need to answer at a finer level of granularity? Is it really critical to know that someone fixed a typo in something day over day, but that the typo wasn't included in any releases? I get that this clashes with the culture you're used to working in, but I don't see where it's actually impactful in a real world sense. edit: a slight rewording
      - ef4 12y ago
        I search through other people's commit histories all the time. Commit logs are by far the most thorough documentation you'll find in the typical codebase. Not for the big things that appear in changelogs, but for the little things like "why the heck does this line work that way?" Giving Weitse the benefit of the doubt, his commit logs are probably very useful indeed, and not sharing them makes the codebase that much less useful to everyone else. Edit to add: the canonical example is bisection. When something breaks, it is awesome to bisect it down to the precise change that broke it. Bisection lets you narrow the scope down to a vastly smaller problem space than a whole release would.
  - jacobgreenleaf 12y ago
    How are you going to view the diff between more than two temporally adjacent commits? Or find the commit upon which an arbitrary line of source code was added? Or x, or y, or z reasons that are so painfully easy to enumerate?
- watson 12y ago
  I feel many people in here don't actually read the entire post. It mentions several times that there is a VCS. It even gives a link: https://github.com/vdukhovni/postfix https://github.com/vdukhovni/postfix
jeremymcanally 12y ago
If they don't want contributors then why take patches via email? (Unless that bit wasn't actually true)
- jkrems 12y ago
  I understood it as: They don't want the low barrier to entry that "one-click let me hack this in the browser" a la Github enables.* E.g. they are not actively seeking to increase the number of contributors. (*) Which is awesome for many/most projects. But there a valid reasons not to want it.

kraemate 12y ago

The first poster in that thread was just asking for trouble, bringing that know-it-all attitude.

meepmorp 12y ago

> So, now I'm a "kid" (with the obvious insinuation that I'm dumb and inexperienced) if I think maybe perhaps version control is a good idea You're misreading the thread. The specific comment was: > kids these days see every software development/maintenance task as something that must get crushed under a git-shaped sledgehammer regardless of whether that's the reasonable or sensible thing to do. which is seems more like a knock against git and possibly the culture around sites like github, than against version control per se. One person in the thread does say that the author uses VCS, but doesn't make it public. The contributors to the project seem happy with the current setup and workflow, and frankly the guy who was looking for a public repository was kind of a dick about it.

dbecker 12y ago

sheer disdain displayed for good-but-differing practices is depressing. Funny you should criticize the postfix community for this. Did you see what they are responding to? Source control (SCM/VCS) is a MUST have. It's unbelievable that people just work with tarballs without proper source control. It doesn't matter which you use, but it must be available. Sending patches over email is what people did last century... I think the "kids these days" comment was in reference to someone waltzing in, contributing nothing, and demanding everything immediately be done their way.

throwaway0010 12y ago
Contribution is not a prerequisite for criticism. Deserved criticism, in this case.
- bandushrew 12y ago
  VCS is being used, so the criticism is unfounded: "i would suggest that you ask questions first or be quiet the postfix author is using a VCS but he do not need to provide access to you or me " Anyone can criticise anything for any reason. Criticism is so easy to generate that it is worth absolutely nothing. The process they use works for them. I guarantee that I could come into your place of work and criticise pretty much everything you do, pointing out that there is a better way of doing it (because there will be, from some angle). This is not useful, and whether or not I am correct on any specific point it is unlikely to be well received.
  - superuser2 12y ago
    If you can come into my place of work and find out that we don't have backups, we're not hashing customer passwords, everyone is sharing a single user account, or we don't lock the doors at night, please do criticize. Rejecting widely accepted good/necessary practice like that for no apparent reason other than "it's working for us so far" is stupid, arrogant, irresponsible, and wrong. In this case, however, the criticism is unfounded because Postfix is using source control internally. Whether the system is exposed to the public is inconsequential as long as it's being used. There is no way you can spin it as anything even remotely close to okay if there was no change tracking in the Postfix project at all.

charlesism 12y ago

This is Postfix, which is older than some of you here on HN. Possibly the OP studied it when he was at college. Bearing that in mind, the tone of that email shows a total lack of respect. Write the email, fine, but word it in a manner that gives the Postfix devs the benefit of the doubt.