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"End of life. I think I said it's finished - meaning done". EOL and complete/stable are not the same thing. Well, quite, as the entire conversation makes very

"End of life. I think I said it's finished - meaning done". EOL and complete/stable are not the same thing. Well, quite, as the entire conversation makes very clear. Rob doesn't say it was end of life, he said it was finished. He says "End of life." at the beginning of the para here to headline this part of his reply. "If you end up telling your users "Please - use something else and don't come back." you're the problem." He's not telling his users to get lost. His users are very happy and have used this project for ages and at massive scale because it's stable and it works. He's telling one particular user to get lost, a user that doesn't even understand how github works.

viraptor 12y ago
Communicating by text is hard. If you're not explicit, people could read something different than you intended - I read the last quote as saying project is EOL. The quoting is not obvious. I stand by my opinion though. If you tell this to any single user, you're just being a mean person for no reason and you are the reason they are unlikely to understand what the issue is about. Maybe that user just read the message and wrote to people he knows "I'm never using opensource projects from github, and this maintainer is the reason." - how does that situation improve in the community? Rob could end it in so many different ways that would be less aggressive. He didn't even say "learn how github/FOSS works and then check the project again", just "don't come back". It sounds like it's us-vs-them and "they" cannot be expected to learn and improve.
- barrkel 12y ago
  I've seen the entitlement Rob has seen, and to be frank, I see it a little bit in your messages to. Rob doesn't owe this user anything. Nothing. Not even a reply. He's being nice by responding at all. The passive-aggressive undertone to the user's questions - trying to evaluate the project to use it, and freeload on Rob's work, rather than take it as a starting point for further customization and personal stewardship, while criticizing things like performance before he's measured anything - this is pretty hard to swallow. Rob may have responded to the cluelessness a little harshly, but it's hard to hold everything back when you're in a conversation with someone like this. And I don't blame him, because like I said, the guy wasn't owed anything. Users like this aren't the "customers" for a piece of code like this. This is a seed file that you hack and customize for your purposes; it's not a library that you simply link in, or pull from upstream on a regular basis. The right thing to say to a user like this is: go away; this is not for you.
  - Dylan16807 12y ago
    > the passive-aggressive undertone The what?
- brudgers 12y ago
  The bugfiler was engaged in trolling behavior. There's no upside to treating it as anything else.

viraptor 12y ago

Communicating by text is hard. If you're not explicit, people could read something different than you intended - I read the last quote as saying project is EOL. The quoting is not obvious. I stand by my opinion though. If you tell this to any single user, you're just being a mean person for no reason and you are the reason they are unlikely to understand what the issue is about. Maybe that user just read the message and wrote to people he knows "I'm never using opensource projects from github, and this maintainer is the reason." - how does that situation improve in the community? Rob could end it in so many different ways that would be less aggressive. He didn't even say "learn how github/FOSS works and then check the project again", just "don't come back". It sounds like it's us-vs-them and "they" cannot be expected to learn and improve.

barrkel 12y ago
I've seen the entitlement Rob has seen, and to be frank, I see it a little bit in your messages to. Rob doesn't owe this user anything. Nothing. Not even a reply. He's being nice by responding at all. The passive-aggressive undertone to the user's questions - trying to evaluate the project to use it, and freeload on Rob's work, rather than take it as a starting point for further customization and personal stewardship, while criticizing things like performance before he's measured anything - this is pretty hard to swallow. Rob may have responded to the cluelessness a little harshly, but it's hard to hold everything back when you're in a conversation with someone like this. And I don't blame him, because like I said, the guy wasn't owed anything. Users like this aren't the "customers" for a piece of code like this. This is a seed file that you hack and customize for your purposes; it's not a library that you simply link in, or pull from upstream on a regular basis. The right thing to say to a user like this is: go away; this is not for you.
- Dylan16807 12y ago
  > the passive-aggressive undertone The what?
brudgers 12y ago
The bugfiler was engaged in trolling behavior. There's no upside to treating it as anything else.