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Comment by dagwieers | Hacker News Reader

It didn't just slip their mind, they did not really care: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1614277#c7

The decision to do this was made before June 2018, 18 months after the last activity. One of the reasons cited was lack of activity, but that is no thanks to them, I guess.

That is why I am convinced the goal was to replace it from the onset, there was no interest in helping out the project. In fact "no activity" was the right excuse to make their action seem legitimate. Attempting to contact the project could have jeopardized that plan.

They could have just removed "dstat" from the distribution, and added a note that users can now use pcp-dstat. But now they made it impossible for users to add the original dstat. Let alone the support nightmare of having a different tool with the same name. There's no winning this one.

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I totally agree that they should have left a note on the issue tracker - even if they thought it would go unread. However I think you're being a little unfair on this one point.

>there was no interest in helping out the project.

They saw that people were filing issues and making pull requests and that those people were getting total radio silence. I can understand how someone might think "well, people are already trying to 'help the project' and the maintainer isn't even acknowledging it, so it's a waste of time".

And while again I totally understand and agree that they should have tried to contact you, you've known about the removal for like 9 months and you apparently never reached out to them either? Like, a couple words in reply to a bugzilla or an IRC message does not amount to picking a fight with a company.

Huh? Jumping to conclusions while not knowing all the facts. Please read up on the discussions that we had _after_ Red Hat made this decision. Their decision was made, end of discussion.

I am sure they made a sound business decision, and I think as a result of that I made the right personal decision. And here we are now having this meta-discussion with people not having a clue. Welcome !

You knew that it had been removed from Fedora months before they announced it was going to be replaced in RHEL. You seem totally confident that they wouldn't have just added the package back once you showed back up and addressed the issues that lead to it's removal. Maybe that's true, but I'm not sure it is.

There was a discussion in the Github issues. From that it was pretty clear this was a done deal. If the project is no longer maintained, why would they. And they had the PCP reimplementation ready.

You seem to imply there was no communication, and I stopped the project out of the blue. That is a misrepresentation.

Nobody stepped up to take over maintainership, and I don't see anyone doing that now. But if someone wants to try, I can unarchive the project and restore the PRs and issues.

If not, the king is dead, long live the king!

While Redhat did not handle this situation well you are also being very unfair to them. Why would they waste their time trying to contribute to a dead project? If I see that patches do not get merged and that bug reports go unanswered I will not bother doing anything because I know my time will be wasted, and I do not fault RedHat for doing the same.

What they should have done is tried to reach out to you before forking.

Unfair in what way?

They included in RHEL and sold it as part of their product when it suited them, and now they have replaced it because it suited them. That's fine, I don't have to agree.

Are you the person that used to maintain a bunch of rpm(s) ? Thanks a lot for doing that, it helped me a couple of times

Thanks :-)

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