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Comment by monkin | Hacker News Reader

What are you talking about? Everyone is allowed to contribute. Did I miss something?

Well neovim folks forked vim bacause they were not allowed to clean up the code and fix vimscript among other things IIRC.

It is very unfortunate that they could not find an agreement.

From my understanding they forked it over disagreement for terminal implementation in VIM based on bunch of unfinished code. Which Bram didn’t wanted to add until it’s properly implemented.

I think what parent is implying is that it is difficult to get a commit past Bram Moolenaar.

I did a PR regarding some rarely-used setting a couple of years ago, as part of a uni course in architecture. It wasn't merged immediately as I didn't write tests for it, but Moolenaar wrote the tests himself later, and merged it.

https://github.com/vim/vim/pull/3539

https://github.com/vim/vim/commit/375e3390078e740d3c83b0c118...

I see huge amount of PR merged with VIM on daily basis send by other people.

I think that every open source project used by thousands of people should have person like Bram. Who will draw a line and separate low quality or effort PRs. Many hate it and call them dictators, but that's just taking care of your own project, and keeping it at the highest standard.

I think no open source project should have a maintainer who answers the question of how to make the project succeed in the future with:

“Keep me alive” [1]

[1] https://www.binpress.com/vim-creator-bram-moolenaar-intervie...

That's what is technically known as "a joke".

I took a quick look at the contributor graph:

https://github.com/vim/vim/graphs/contributors

Other than one solitary commit, that graph makes it look like every single one of the 13,000 commits to Vim has been made by Bram. What's going on there?

Incidentally I wondered what caused the huge jump in commits that has been sustained since the beginning of 2016. I thought initially that may have coincided with the announcement of Neovim, but that announcement seems to have been a couple of years earlier. Maybe it took a couple of years for Neovim to see significant adoption though.

Patches are send to mailing list, and Bram commits them do repository after review. Each contribution is credited in commit message, and VIM docs.

I like this approach better than GitHub “everyone send us a PR”. These days having a “change a typo” PR to show activity on GitHub is appealing to masses, but mailing list sifts out people who don’t have anything serious to add = less work in managing open source project. As we can see lot’s of maintainers have a problem with that, and users that demand stuff (at least once a month there’s a topic about it on HN). :-)

Thank you. Having a mailing list based workflow is fairly common for long established projects. That doesn't seem to preclude setting the Author field to the actual author when Bram lands people's contributions though. Unless that's an additional layer to discourage low value contributions by eliminating the visible credit people would get in their github commit history. Are there other projects that do that?

As I mention before, each of contributions is credited on GitHub commits, and VIM docs. So you still can showcase those in your portfolio, by writing case study or short information as it was before GitHub... :-)

Well, The Vim's BDFL is not that benevolent after all, hence the neovim fork.

As one who depends implicitly on Vim, he seems to me very benevolent: he doesn’t let other people break Vim.

I greatly appreciate Vim’s stability. But it’s also not only Bram that can develop it, especially on maintenance patches (as distinct from new features). I can’t think of any particular times anything regressed in Vim, except that I have a feeling there was one. A few times over the years I’ve found bugs, and each time, I’ve either submitted a patch which has been rapidly accepted, or reported the bug and it’s been fixed rapidly by Bram or someone else.

I just checked the GitHub project for neovim and see that their CI is failing. That maybe is a good symbol of the differences in priorities

You might want to check the CI history of vim too if you want to compare meaningless metrics.

https://github.com/vim/vim/actions?query=workflow%3A%22GitHu...

BDFL is not about taking any code that people throw at you. Look at LKML at how many iteration patches go through before they are merged.

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