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Comment by RayDonnelly | Hacker News Reader

So it's not really an open source project in any meaningful way?

Do you consider it reasonable for people to waste their time making PRs and working trying to help you to improve the silver searcher?

Could you put something up describing this policy?

Could you recruit someone who's proven themselves to be maybe somewhere near as good as you to be a co-maintainer?

As I say I couldn't care less about my PR now since I've moved to rg, but this was an absolutely horrible experience.

Either embrace open source and do it right or please, do not bother releasing source code.

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As the maintainer of ripgrep, I'd like to respectfully ask you not to harass other maintainers of open source projects about how they spend their free time. I've been where ggreer is and it's not pleasant. I completely understand their position, and a little empathy on your part would go a long way. In an ideal world, the maintenance status of a project would be mentioned in the project README, but speaking from personal experience, this is seemingly difficult to do in practice.

In what way is updating README.md difficult? Please have as much respect for contributors and potential contributors as you seem to have for maintainers. They're all people after all and their free time is equally important.

In theory, I agree. But again, speaking from personal experience as the maintainer of several somewhat popular projects, it is actually emotionally difficult to update the maintenance status. It appears trivial from the outside, and to some extent I agree with what you're saying about being respectful of others' time, but we should nevertheless do our best to be kind to others. Calling out a maintainer in an off topic comment is not being kind.

You are completely right. I apologize.

I respectfully disagree with you. I wasted perhap 10 hours of my life or more on this PR (pointlessly rebasing it a few times). 95 other PRs are outstanding. There are many ways to improve this situation. I pointed two of them out:

    1. Declare that you won't accept (or even review) them, preferably at the top of README.md *
    2. Give a second person merge status.

I have some empathy for the maintainer but I also have empathy for the prospective contributors who spent a chunk of their free time working on https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/pulls

I've done my bit here to stop wasting people's time globally, I don't consider a maintainer's time more valuable than a contributor's time. That's elitest nonsense.

https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/issues/1284

* The likely side-effect is a unblessed fork (or people not wasting their time, or if they do, well, they didn't read the README.md and cannot be too annoyed at anyone but themselves).

Come on dude, I just want to enjoy my long weekend. Please stop bothering me by creating spurious issues on my GitHub repo.

OK sure, but would you consider merging one PR that explains that people should not expect PRs to get reviewed? I'm happy to do the work if you'll review and merge it.

That way we can avoid unfortunate incidents such as this in future.

Other people want to modify my project, usually in ways that break it, and somehow I am obligated to provide my time and skills to them for free? I don't understand where you're coming from at all.

You don't want to waste your own precious time but are more than happy for many other people to waste theirs?

Also you merged commits starting from 24 Dec 2011 and ending on 18th August. Presumably you saw value in those commits?

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