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Comment by blihp | Hacker News Reader

Unless you have something specific to point out / warn users about, why? It is what it is, and unless users contribute something back to make it better, it's cost them nothing. If they did contribute something back, then hopefully it's a little less shitty. Unless the library in question is objectively bad and/or non-functional, no apologies or disclaimers are necessary.

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I see nothing wrong with a disclaimer along the lines of "This is a hobby project. As the author I care about this project and want it to be as good as possible but don't expect the kind of polish you'd see in projects with corporate backings." It doesn't discredit the project in any capacity, it just tempers users expectations.

But this is clearly the default situation for any project not hosted under an organisation.

You'd assume so but as others have recently started posting in the comments on this thread, maintainers for small projects regularly get barraged with demands and spam/other forms of aggression in retaliation for not meeting said demands.

I'm not sure why but some people like to assume that just because you posted something online that you must fix any problem people have while using it and add any feature that it doesn't have. I suspect that this is the main reason those "This is a hobby. Please don't get mad at me if there's a problem" README tags started showing up.

"(just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) "

Why not? Sticking a disclaimer saying "this has basically no test coverage" at the top of your readme has negligible cost and might stop someone from being fired.

Of course, there's no obligation or even expectation that you should provide such a warning, but if you're already thinking about it, might as well just do it.

At risk of sounding like a gatekeeper, maybe someone getting reprimanded for using an untested, production unready library isn't a bad thing.

It's not realistic to read through all the source of every dependency you use, but it should be encouraged for developers to take a more active approach in evaluating dependencies they pull in - at least to check how active development is, what sort of open issues there may be, test coverage, code quality sniff tests, what the license is etc.

I'd be willing to bet most GPL violations are due to ignorance, rather than intentional.

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