FOQ – Frequently Obnoxious Questions When Doing an Open Source Project

by oddell • 10 years ago

63 36 10 years ago

finnn• 10 years ago

Q: Would you guys consider moving off Google groups to a real mailing list?
Sure if there was a good reason.

I haven't checked their group specifically, but every other Google Group I've tried to join without using my gmail account simply refused to let me join. People seem to insist that it's possible, but every time I've tried it's put me in an endless "verify your email" loop.

tikhonj• 10 years ago

Why is our infrastructure important to you?

Presumably because it affects how difficult it would be to contribute to the project? This sort of "us v them" outlook seems to be at odds with the nature of open source.

I know a few Haskell projects moved from Darcs to Git recently. While it's sad because Darcs is awesome and underused, lowering the barrier to contribute is probably a net good. Questions about infrastructure like this are by no means unreasonable.

dalke8• 10 years ago

My presumption is that the question is more one of social conformity. Consider "why don't you wear a suit?", "why don't you stand for the Pledge of Allegiance?", "why do you eat fish on Friday?", "why can't you answer the phone on Saturday?"

Those are structurally similar questions, with the underlying premise "you are different." What obligation does the person who is different have to explain to those who don't understand? Very little if any, I think.

Now, your presumption does have some merit. My experience says that it's very minor. Very few people contribute to a project, and infrastructure rarely plays a role.

The FOQ even points out in the second answer, "There have been seven website patches from the community in the last three years". How many more contribution do you think they would get if they switched to Markdown over HTML? And how much work would it be to convert both the website and existing practices? Is it worthwhile?

at odds with the nature of open source

Well, yes and no. "Open source" is applied to both a development model and a distribution model. My company sells software under a BSD license. I am the primary developer, though I've received a few patches and I paid someone to work on part of the code.

The development is all through my email. Do you call that "open source" or do you prefer a different label?

The difference is less entangled in the free software philosophy. You have the freedom to develop code for yourself and distribute it, and to ignore contributions. Compare that to your view concerning open source software, where there is at least some obligation to consider external contributions.

rudePolice• 10 years ago

Sounds like whining when I read it out loud

logicallee• 10 years ago

curious what made you read it out loud? (this isn't a pointed question, your critique applies without the article being read out loud.)

gravypod7• 10 years ago

This "FOQ" does not come off as anything but something written by someone on a very high horse.

For a project owner to need to write a page about these common questions, why would you not instead implement these common requests?

I've often done this in some of my projects, which could be considered a microcosm of this.

I've never heard of this application, but if there is a module system, why not write a few modules for some other people? Unless your api is horrible, it shouldn't be too difficult to implement all of the "Why Didn't You Implement My Favorite Feature?" if you are familiar with the code base.

notacoward4• 10 years ago

why would you not instead implement these common requests?

Because time is finite. Apparently you're one of the few developers that doesn't have 10x more feature requests than you have resources to work on them. Good for you. However, that's not the norm.

why not write a few modules for some other people?

See above. It's a mistake to generalize from young and/or small projects to those that have become large and complex over time.

gravypod7• 10 years ago

On every project that I have worked on, developer support for projects increased with the amount of users.

I would understand if there was no one using this project and it was a one-person operation, but if you are getting so many requests that it is literally impossible to comply with the top 5% of them then you should have made friends with enough people in your community who would be suited for doing these tasks.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying do every single request and I am definitely not saying spend most of your time doing requests. But my the developers admission, "Taskwarrior [...] is easy to programmatically convert to any other data interchange format."

If it would make that many people happy, to the point where you need to have a link handy to tell them "no", then it might be worth it just to write the feature that everyone seems to want, even if it is in an optionally usable format like a 'module'.

tptacek2• 10 years ago

For a project owner to need to write a page about these common questions, why would you not instead implement these common requests?

The whole document is about answering each of those common questions individually.

gravypod7• 10 years ago

If it gets to the point where someone says "can you implement X, Y, and Z for me, it would make my life much better" isn't it better to just implement it and make everyone happier rather than write a web page just telling them essentially to get out?

throw12121• 10 years ago

Q: Why won't you spend your free time implementing my favorite feature?

If you're not paying us, you need to convince us that your feature is so great, that it's worth giving up our free time to work on.

This is open source. Scratch thine own itch.

gravypod7• 10 years ago

Not everyone knows how to program. If a programmer asks for a feature, tell a programmer to write it, if someone who is interested in programming help them write a feature, but if enough people officially request a feature it's better to just help the lot of them.

notacoward4• 10 years ago

I totally understand where this is coming from. Any software project of non-trivial size has a certain kind of inertia. The code is written a certain way, the infrastructure works a certain way, the processes and culture are a certain way, because they have evolved over time and often at great cost. Changing them is not easy, and not to be undertaken lightly. That doesn't mean e.g. that moving to GitHub is absolutely verboten, but the gain in convenience for (some) users might be offset by a total stoppage of development during the transition. Then there's likely to be a general slowdown for a while as new secondary issues are found and addressed, as current developers make mistakes with the new processes, etc. If the same users who demand that change are also demanding that their favorite features be implemented (by someone else) right away, they're putting the developers in an impossible situation. Nobody appreciates that. There always seem to be some users with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement, and that can utterly ruin a project for everyone including the other users.

That said, I have to take serious issue with one point.

We write software. We don't make packages. Talk to your package maintainer.

Wrong. I have lots of friends who are active package maintainers. Theirs is often a thankless job, especially now that so many people seem to think the whole idea of packages is outdated now that we have containers instead (BTW they're wrong). Developers don't have to become experts in every packaging system or its rules, but they can't shirk all responsibility for packaging either. They need to work with package maintainers, fixing (and not re-creating) problems that make packaging difficult. Anyone who can't do that, or isn't willing to, can't claim to have "learned all they can" about software delivery, as I see in the first paragraph of the other Taskwarrior article posted today. Packaging is an essential part of the process.

dalke8• 10 years ago

The scenario here is "The <Operating System> package is out of date, why have you not refreshed it yet."

What should the Taskwarrior developers do to fix that?

You suggest the failure is due to 'problems that make packaging difficult'. But perhaps it's the lack of an active package maintainer?

notacoward4• 10 years ago

Perhaps. Automatically putting the onus on the developer would be wrong, but so is automatically putting the onus on the packager. It's a collaborative process. Blaming the packager represents exactly the same sense of entitlement that the author complains about among users demanding features. Packagers are often volunteers too, doing what they do in their spare time. Usually they're glad to push out a package for a developer who is doing their best to facilitate the process themselves, but blindly passing the buck doesn't fit that description.

ForHackernews• 10 years ago

Cool, I'll continue not using and not contributing to this project I've never heard of until just now.

laurent123456• 10 years ago

I don't get who this page is for. Those who ask "obnoxious questions" usually don't read FAQs or FOQs so they'll keep asking them anyway.

However, I could see how this kind of document could deter people who actually want to contribute, since they might not want to deal with the condescending tone of the owners.

Semiapies• 10 years ago

I have to admit, my reaction to the repeated "Why do you care about our infrastructure?" is "I don't, or about your project."

That's part of the nature of following a random HN link, of course, but after reading that, I'm certainly not inclined to care more about this project I've never heard of. And I say this being completely aware of annoying feature requests.

_qbjt• 10 years ago

The condescension on this page is staggering.

murkle• 10 years ago

You missed one: "Why don't you rewrite your whole project in Scala now now now?"

FOQ – Frequently Obnoxious Questions When Doing an Open Source Project

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