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Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

Not having a feature is fine. Kind of having a feature but hiding it behind obnoxious gatekeeping is not fine. Features that are buggy or inexplicably complex is not fine.

Some open source projects get this right, and others don't. Some projects don't care about wasting the user's time. Or they berate the user for wanting to do something in the 'wrong' way. Or they break things that worked just fine in the pursuit of some abstract purity.

It's not about complexity or technology at all. It's an attitude problem.

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I really appreciate the way Rust feature gates unstable features. It's easy to opt into nightly if you need them, it's nice that new features are iterated until they are correct and it is nice to rely on stable being stable.

You can just prefix features with --experimental so people can use their own judgement. Software should warn users when they do something that might harm them. But it shouldn't patronizingly refuse to run.

"I'm sorry bryanlarsen, I'm afraid I can't do that." - 2023 a rustfmt Odyssey.

Is the code actually there on non-nightly builds or is it just a simple text response for the experimental flag?

For the former then sure, it should just let you do the thing and simply fail loudly if it fails. For the latter, there's not much they can really do without switching you over to nightly rust.

>Features that are buggy or inexplicably complex is not fine.

really depends on so many factors that this isn't a good general sentiment. Sure, if this is a professional grade tool targeting corporate, it better be polished or have excellent support for when stuff breaks. If it's some small scrappy tool handling a complex task with all kinds of edge cases I can give some leeway to the UX and even some very esoteric use cases.

vector graphics comes immediately to mind. I won't be too griped if Krita as a FOSS has some subtle bugs. I can at the very lest throw out an issue to at least bring awareness. I'd be much more miffed if Illustrator had some issue given how closed up and hard to contact Adobe is if you're not a million dollar business (not to mention Adobe's general philosophy of how they approach software these days).

Attitude is a factor, but I do take into account the problem space when evaluating feature completeness.

Some lie about working features to get people to read into the project and fix it for them. One liar and his flyer +42 fools make a open source Projekt, even if you can not code to save your life. These projects mostly consist of issues and pull requests..

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