Comment by sophacles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sophacles | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

While I like a lot of the stuff you have incorporated into your fabric, it seems to me that you are trying to take credit for things that have existed as branches to the main codebase of fabric for quite a while. Just off the top of my head: task decorators, parallel execution, better host management and command-line task listing all exist in other people's patches. If you have redone the code, good for you, but at least mention that the ideas and prototype implementations aren't yours. (I don't think a claim to ignorance of such is really that valid either, since the Redmine for the project has tickets for most of the things you've done, and has links to the branches containing them).

As to getting stuff into fabric: a very valid complaint (and one I have myself, since like a lot of people I run my own hacked version of fabric) is that fabric development moves very very slowly. There are several different feature branches in several people's code-bases that could have been released 6 or more months ago. Perhaps if you start pulling other patches that have a lot of functionality complementary to yours, you could have a product good enough to push development on the mainline too (ala gcc/egcs of old...)

Let me get this right. Due to convergent needs, dozens of Fabric users post various ideas to the issue tracker and mailing lists. And over the years, some people hack together personal branches solving some of these issues and, despite the incredible amount of time that's passed, they fail to get their work into the mainline branch.

Eventually, one hacker comes along — who, having been a Fabric user for a long time, has independently experienced similar needs and finding no decent solution, decides to take on the task of implementing the various features himself — making sure that it's clean, backwards compatible and fully documented. And your response is to accuse him of trying to take credit for other people's work?!

I can understand your frustrations with the pace of Fabric development, but accusing another hacker of taking credit for other people's work simply beggars belief. Even more incredible is that so many people decided to upvote you! For the record, I'm not taking credit for anyone else's work. I came up with the various ideas myself and you can look at the code to see that it's not based on anyone else's work. Thank you.

As a side note, your blog is beautiful. Did you design it yourself?

Thank you for the compliment — I was going to write an article a few weeks ago, but ended up spending the evening redesigning the blog instead: http://tav.espians.com/new-site-design-for-2011.html

Procrastination has its benefits I guess, heh. If you fancy them, the css/templates are in https://github.com/tav/blog and the site is run using yatiblog — https://github.com/tav/ampify/blob/master/src/pyutil/yatiblo... — the source is all public domain, so do with it as you please.

I'm also migrating my blog right now, so don't mind if I do! Thank you!

Dude, I'm just saying it is pretty dubious that you show up at the community, poke around the tickets, ask lots of questions, probably notice the roadmap on Redmine where lots of the existing solutions are tagged for inclusion, and after all that interaction claim you singlehandedly fixed everything wrong with the project. I'm sorry if you are somehow upset by my doubt, but you have to admit the whole thing seems just a bit "too good to be true".

As for the difference between independent implementation and code-stealing: I have not and will not accuse you of stealing code. If it came off that way, I apologize.

I will however continue to assume your rooting around other people's work gave you ideas, gave you paths for completion of tasks, and gave you enough working information on reasonable solutions that you can not accurately say you did it by yourself.

Where are you giving the various "defsystem"-implementations credit? I bet 90% of fabric's features where already implemented in any of those 20 to 30 years ago.

Well I've never even heard of defsystem, let alone rooted around in it's implementation.

Nice strawman, but the subtle difference here is in one case the code was not looked at and talked about and in the other it was.

At this point I'm pretty sure I've learned my lesson about release timing (I've also signed on with a job which should give me more time to work on Fabric, since they use it daily). Definitely deserve all the flak I get for being slow, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com