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Comment by kamyarg | Hacker News Reader

Good, I hope pipenv is also included.

Would prevent comments such as "I like the current implementation", "thanks for the feedback, but my ego says no" and "I have no idea" in some of the most important projects of the Python Community.

Or passive-aggressive closure of issues that are clearly affecting people and are issues.

https://github.com/pypa/pipenv/issues/966#issuecomment-34620...

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate requests especially, but a maintainer should be humble also and respect other people independent of how rockstar he is or feels.

I am very happy to see Organisations/people such as pocoo - Armin Ronacher and Sentry - David Cramer etc. are already stepping up to make sure these libs land in the right place and continue to be useful to the community.

Complementary article: https://vorpus.org/blog/why-im-not-collaborating-with-kennet...

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While you have a point about behavior, let’s not forget that the library is _free_. Maintaining such projects is often a hard, thankless job.

The only obligation any maintainer has is to abide by whatever terms they release their code under. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect professional support from any project maintained by a single individual.

I don't think that's the only obligation. The other major obligation of a maintainer is to not hurt or impede others in the progress.

Hurting others (which, to be clear, I'm not claiming has happened here) is pretty easy to do. For instance, someone opens a request, you say "Patches welcome," they spend time writing a long implementation, and you say "Never mind, I don't like this feature." You're wasting their time, and had you just not said anything, they would have been in a better place. Writing software with backdoors, or recklessly writing software in a way that makes it prone to vulnerabilities, also hurts people.

Impeding others is a softer form of this. There isn't the ability for five hundred Python dependency management projects to all exist and be successful. If you get your project listed as the standard recommendation https://packaging.python.org/guides/tool-recommendations/ , you are effectively promising that it is suitable for people who need a tool like it, and in turn that you have both the willingness and time to make it happen. You don't have to get it so listed. (You can also, of course, change your mind and de-list it.) You can absolutely say, this is a project for my own needs and I don't want to accept support requests at all. Then, at least, someone else can create a similar tool - either their own, or based on your open-source code (and abiding by your license). But if you're signed up to be the standard tool, you're impeding others who actually do have the time and bandwidth for improvements and would be willing to make a competing tool if you're not able to stand by your commitments.

Excellent points I had not considered.

If as you say, somebody released code saying that it was something they were willing to support, it’s reasonable to expect said author to stand by their statements.

That said, this seems like it would be a more implicit expectation than an explicit agreement in many cases. How could a community enforce good behavior in this regard?

Going by your previous example, would it be reasonable for the recommended list of libraries to be more carefully curated for people on such a way that only stable _and_ well supported libraries are put forward? Putting hard requirements on official recommendations seems like it’s be a fairly simple way to avoid such situations.

> The only obligation any maintainer has is to abide by whatever terms they release their code under.

That's not actually true, right? The obligation flows the other direction. People who receive the code are obligated to abide by the terms. The author does not have to do anything except follow the law. They are not bound by the terms under which they are distributing their code.

I worded that poorly. I meant “terms” in the general sense, as some sort of agreement between two parties, but you are absolutely correct.

True, I agree with how hard it is, but if users say a feature that is an integral part of the tool is broken, that should be priority or if you don't have time/interest just give it to people that can take care of it. I am not talking about a company asking for a new feature, I am asking for a bug that makes your popular PSF-recommended tool do unexpected stuff. (see the https://github.com/pypa/pipenv/issues/1554 as an example)

Earlier response to the vorpus criticism (presumably):

https://www.kennethreitz.org/essays/requests3-update

I have to be honest here, we as users of his libraries are not entitled to anything. Yes, there are people who do a great job at passing on the baton, but it is unfortunate to see folks who take the work of open source contributors for granted.

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