Ancestors

Written by Jamie Gaskins on 2024-11-29 at 22:30

Someday, I want to write about how OSS fosters an us-vs-them mentality, pitting project maintainers against external contributors. It happens on both sides.

The TL;DR is that the maintainers have a rapport with each other and an intimate understanding of the project. Contributors are usually trying to scratch their own itches.

Contributors often think maintainers don't care about their use case and maintainers often see contributors as ignorant of the effort req'd to maintain it.

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Written by Jamie Gaskins on 2024-11-29 at 22:41

The hard part is there are more than enough anecdotes on both sides to support either case:

• maintainers shutting down (or even attacking) a contributor because their contribution isn't exactly what they want or the contributor didn't show sufficient deference or whatever

• contributors demanding that maintainers build shit for them for free — every maintainer has heard something along the lines of "this is stupid, how is this still not fixed?"

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Written by Jamie Gaskins on 2024-12-15 at 23:34

Here's an example of this in action, with myself as the contributor. Responses from 3 maintainers in the thread:

• one says "you shouldn't use it this way" with no acknowledgement that the documentation doesn't say this

• another makes a vague claim and ignores my request for clarification, despite responding to another maintainer afterward

• one posts a lot of code that proves the wrong points and then "whatever, still no"

🙃

https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/pull/15270

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Toot

Written by Jamie Gaskins on 2024-12-15 at 23:47

No acknowledgement that two immutable objects with identical state being unequal doesn't make sense, which is what I went in there to fix.

All I got was judgement of my use case despite the fact that it not working for my use case is almost certainly an accident. All the while the maintainers were patting each other on the back in emoji reactions.

That doesn't leave me with a good feeling.

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Descendants

Written by alexanderadam on 2024-12-15 at 23:59

@jamie after reading this I'm still not sure what would be the advantage of having this comparison.

I fully agree that the discussed points should be added to the documentation though.

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Written by Jamie Gaskins on 2024-12-16 at 00:42

@alexanderadam Two advantages:

1. Principle of least surprise

2. When two objects with the same state are equal, it makes comparing objects that contain them trivial

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