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Comment by talkin | Hacker News Reader

The more silly[1] comments are from the maintainer, saying you should update configs with workarounds for patch releases.

1: Suggested package: sillier.

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I looked through some of the more commented on issues and there are a lot of instances from silly and aggressive suggestions from the maintainers. I get that they're burnt out but sadly I see this kind of thing quite often on OSS projects: people have very real concerns and reasonable suggestions, and are met with the most jaded and burnt out responses possible.

"It's not my commit that it is wrong, it's the rest of the world that needs to fix their code."

This is such an insane position to take for a maintainer. Don't be idealistic and silly. If you break compatibility, it is on you. No one cares that you are right.

The Linus Torvalds "we do not break the user-space, ever" mantra should be a best practice for every open source programmer, and user-space in this case is "what the rest of the world is doing".

Bad initial designs then will forever doom any project, if only the project has a few users. And there are lots of bad designs in the open source world and in the programming projects world in general. Especially so in the NPM and Python ecosystems. In many widespread tools.

The issue here is that the change was done in a patch release. You can correct your past mistakes, but you should signal incompatibilities to your users by incrementing the major version.

At least have the courtesy to bump the major version number. If you're going to break compatibility, then own it. If what you're doing is really for the best then don't try to do it quietly in shame, announce it with fanfare.

> The Linus Torvalds "we do not break the user-space, ever" mantra should be a best practice for every open source programmer

I think that has to forever live in tension with its opposite. I mean, every opensource project also lives or dies based on the volunteered time of its maintainers. If "being be idealistic and silly" is needed to keep maintainers around, then its not silly.

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