Quotes and sources to use when dealing with delicate OSS situations
One of the reasons contributions to open source fail is because they are submitted without the “why”, just the “what”.
— Jason McCreary (@gonedark) June 23, 2019
Spend time to craft the PR with why the change is needed. What was the problem before? How does this solve it?
OSS is hard. You get a flood of issues, pull requests, questions, etc. It is impossible to do something on all of them. They become stale and this is the best way to stop things from overgrowing and decaying. https://t.co/Gc0XaY4Mx6
— Jonathan H. Wage (@jwage) April 20, 2019
No project is immune to bugs.
— Samuel Nitsche - happens online (@Der_Pesse) March 21, 2019
The question is often how quickly it can be resolved and assured to never happen again in future.
Awesome work @Baalowy and @GebalJacek https://t.co/4Kpf9LLLjA
The question of bugs in software is ripe for reexamination. There's no much unnecessary guilt and self-loathing tied up in bugs. https://t.co/e7lXD6uh7w
— DHH (@dhh) August 5, 2019
Nah. I will always push back on personal attacks on my team. In parallel, we will work on a systemic approach for removing bullying and harassment.
— Dantley Davis (@dantley) July 24, 2019
I’m really disappointed that some users spoke so disrespectfully about members of the team responsible for the new Twitter web site. Critcism on our work and decisions is fair game. Personal attacks aren’t. Ask yourself, what would your mom think of your behavior? 🤦♀️ is my guess.
— Dantley Davis (@dantley) July 24, 2019
Saw a few tweets today by people annoyed with #Symfony, which is fine, but sometimes reads as hostile. It’s maintained by people, many spending their free time, making it better for everyone - not just you - and you can always join them. There are many ways to contribute.
— Denis Brumann (@dbrumann) August 7, 2019
The community management trap:
— Conal Pierse (@ConalPierse) August 18, 2019
1: People are acting like assholes
2: You try to calmly explain an issue
3: They ignore you and continue being assholes
4: You ask them to stop being assholes
5: They feign outrage, act like bigger assholes, and call you unprofessional
Please don’t pester maintainers with demands like “FIX THIS” or even worse, threaten to “I’ll have to switch to X if you don’t” which I’ve heard many times. It can even have the opposite affect—them ignoring you.
— Jay Phelps (@_jayphelps) October 3, 2019
Unless you pay for a license or have a support agreement. https://t.co/vqRr98S5xL
"Folks, +1-ing on issues is very much bad manners on open source projects: if you want to see it done, step up and help.
— Alexandre 🐿 ❤️👹#onEstLaTech (@pockystar) May 13, 2020
A "+1" is a good way to annoy already busy maintainers: stop that." - from @Ocramius
<3 <3 <3
If you want a maintainer to respond to your issue, here's a list of things NOT to say:
— Frank de Jonge (@frankdejonge) March 8, 2020
- Merge please
- Please merge now
- This needs to be fixed asap
- Please fix now
- Fix now please
- Why is this not fixed?
- How come this is not merged?
- Is this project still maintained?
Do you think OSS devs are breaking BC in patch releases intentionally (semver anyone)? Nope, they are humans like you, they make mistakes.
— Fabien Potencier (@fabpot) June 9, 2020
It's like saying that you should never deploy bugs in production. Sure. But human beings are not perfect, stop whining and deal with it.
How to deal with white people who are offended by updated terminology pic.twitter.com/Ba3kmrnfZq
— Brandon Kelly (@brandonkelly) June 19, 2020
"If you don't drop IE11 you are perpetuating the madness!", "Kill IE11 support!" Having wasted months of my life making WC and Proxy's work on IE11 along with some crazy nasty bugs, I couldn't agree more! However a thread on why is not that simple, especially on enterprise: 👇
— Diego Ferreiro Val (@diervo) July 2, 2020
Angry 10x GitHub developer: “I don’t like this default setting!!!”
— John O'Nolan 🏴☠️ (@JohnONolan) June 27, 2020
Me: “Good news, it’s open source, so you can just change it to work how you prefer”
Dev: “NO. I want you to change the default based on my usecase”
“We’re not going to do that”
Dev: “WOW I cannot BELIEVE this”
Ce n'est pas parce que toi tu en a besoin que ta PR est forcément dans la continuité de ce que veux faire la core team. Donc faut bien faire attention à distinguer un bugfix d'une feature quand on applique ce raisonnement.tou Quoi qu'il en soit, y'a toujours le fork.
— Alexandre 🐿 ❤️👹#onEstLaTech (@pockystar) July 11, 2020
Because you haven’t built it 😎
— Taylor Otwell 🏜 (@taylorotwell) July 17, 2020
Maintain two major versions, they said. It'll be easy, they said. pic.twitter.com/UqSqwEN4O1
— Colin O'Dell (@colinodell) July 19, 2020
Open Source: If you’re not willing to contribute, you’re not allowed to complain.
— Gary Hockin (@GeeH) January 28, 2015
Based on some life experience pic.twitter.com/h2VqjUPzM9
— Emily (@EmilyKager) October 29, 2020
The quality of your software project is coupled to the OSS you use. Updating those libraries, testing betas and giving feedback is part of your job!
— Christopher Hertel (@el_stoffel) October 7, 2020
"No one will pay for that" is not a good argument while discussing such things with someone who dedicates their freetime on OSS!
As an OSS maintainer you don't owe anyone anything at all.
— Dries Vints (@driesvints) October 4, 2020
Anything. At. All.
You are responsible for your own (mental) health. Do whatever you want or need to take care of yourself. Build the things that make you happy. Abandon the things that are making you unhappy.
Things to never ask an oss maintainer...
— Mike Hartington (@mhartington) December 4, 2020
- Any update?
- Whats the progress on this?
- Rough estimate on how long this will take? I need it for work.
If it's important to you, send a pull request.
— Ondřej Mirtes (@OndrejMirtes) November 22, 2020
the *craft* of programming begins with empathy, not formatting or languages or tools or algorithms or data structures
— Kent Beck (@KentBeck) February 13, 2015
OSS maintainers do not work for you. They can work with you. This post by @javiereguiluz is worth a read for everyone who or contributes to OSS: https://t.co/frRua89hdf
— Christian Flothmann (@xabbuh) July 2, 2021
One of the most stressful parts of product development (especially open source) is when people are frustrated you haven’t made the improvement they want and automatically attribute it to complacency or ignoring the community instead of just being completely buried in work to do.
— Adam Wathan (@adamwathan) April 11, 2021
"But my change is a fix!"
— Nick Craver (@Nick_Craver) May 9, 2021
Yes, I agree for you it fixes something. But for another indeterminate number people, it breaks something.
This seems to be a hard concept for devs: even if it has 200 upvotes, that doesn't mean the proposed change won't break 100,000 other users.
We have two complex features that were added (JIT and fibers) with little demonstrable benefit to the avg. user. 🥴
— Taylor Otwell 🥭 (@taylorotwell) May 1, 2021
When maintaining Laravel, I want to merge PRs with low complexity but high user impact. High complexity and low user impact are the *worst* PRs you could accept.
A quick definition of Open-Source pic.twitter.com/WhRAEAnrmq
— Fabien Potencier (@fabpot) November 4, 2021
Enterprises still have not figured out that with digitalization they are also now tech companies and their dependencies on open source are business critical and need to be nurtured. Open source is free as in free puppies. You need to take care of it.
— Mike Milinkovich (@mmilinkov) December 14, 2021
My favourite template for writing good PRs.
— Loris (@lorismatic) December 10, 2021
☞ Context: Help maintainers be on the same page.
☞ Problem: What's wrong.
☞ Solution: Sum up your solution.
☞ Changes: Sum up the changes made.
☞ Usage: Add examples for clarity and docs.
☞ Tests: Show you're not breaking things.
They look for opportunities and propose meaningful changes. Changes that are scoped, pragmatic, usually incremental. Their changes “feel” more like “carving out” what should be “already there” rather than attaching something extra. They make the $PROJECT feel more $PROJECT-y.
— Dan (@dan_abramov) November 25, 2021
PHP 8.1 is out!
— Ciaran McNulty (@CiaranMcNulty) November 26, 2021
If your favourite open source tools don't support it yet, please remember the maintainers are humans dealing with life