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Comment by Razengan | Hacker News Reader

I don’t get these kinds of complaints about open source projects..

Seems like you guys want either 0% or 100% ..that something either not exist at all or perfectly does everything you ever wanted without any effort or cost on your part.

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You want a process and commitment, a clear distinction between which things are first-class and which things aren't. If this is just an experimental project that may not go anywhere, fine. If this is meant to be the new way of writing Gnome apps, displacing Vala, and they're going to support it in LTS releases for at least the next n years, fine. But it should be clear which it is.

It doesn't have to be 100%, but nobody wants to invest a ton of time/energy into a project just to hit a wall a little ways down the road when something at the very core of it breaks or becomes unmaintained. Of course it would be nice for users of such projects to help and contribute, but this isn't always practical. Not because the users are being entitled assholes, but often times they aren't even the same skillsets, and I think this is especially true of some of this complicated, low-level UI stuff. If I'm a user of PyGObject writing GTK apps in Python, I'm not necessarily capable of contributing to the underlying C bindings, even if I wanted to be helpful.

This dynamic presents a legitimate problem for pretty much any open source project that aims to abstract away something very complex to enable more developers to use it. Any project that does this is going to have more developers relying on it than are capable of contributing to it.

You should never feel entitled to continued development of a project you don't contribute to, and you should always assess the community around tools you want to use in order to make good decisions. But this doesn't mean you can't be super frustrated if something you rely on goes dormant. I personally avoid using any library/package that doesn't appear to be very active, but nothing is foolproof. Even a seemingly healthy project die can fairly quickly in certain circumstances.

I think the discussion is valid, I don’t see it as complaining. People can create cool things, but you have to weight whether that can actually be used in practice. After all, until AI start writing software for us, maintaining a project takes time and effort. No one wants to see it go to waste.

>Seems like you guys want either 0% or 100% ..that something either not exist at all or perfectly does everything you ever wanted without any effort or cost on your part.

Or, you know, that's a strawman, and we just want something that exists and is mature, like hundreds of other FOSS people are fine with, as opposed to basing our code on something that is immature, has little community, and will probably be abandoned when the authors get bored with it.

Which has nothing to do with it being "100%" or "perfectly doing everything we ever wanted".

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