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Comment by throwaway032023 | Hacker News Reader

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throwaway032023

Words are cheap.

Seems like:

- guy wants to add PR more aggressively to a code base than Flutter currently is

- isn’t clear if they have a concept of handling compatibility between fork and original

- why not be a labor organizing entity and work with the flutter team?

Some of the PR that I am aware of that are stale and could be good candidates - are difficult design decisions and stakes need to be put in the group.

It seems ill advised. This is huge amount of work with limited upside and huge downside (adding uncertainty to outsiders looking in) and tons of effort (just in infrastructure maintenance).

Edit: if I were conspiracy oriented I would think it’s to harm community. I would pay this no mind.

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Note that I know nothing of the Flutter team/culture and am only answering generally:

>why not be a labor organizing entity and work with the flutter team?

Depends on the maintainers/team. I've definitely seen many a bureaucracy that slows down FOSS to a crawl of bug fixes and feature progression. If you make enough PRs that are ignored for weeks or months, you'll realize this isn't really a team ready for nor interested in a proper FOSS environment and it's instead mostly "that teams code that happens to be readable".

Their official answer seems to suggest as much:

>But, sadly, trying to work with the Flutter team delivers a different reality. While some developers have had success working with the Flutter team, many other developers have found it frustrating, if not unworkable.

I guess we'll see. I'm way more of the mentality of "actions speak louder" so I'm not really one to announce my plans until I get something worthwhile off the ground (in this case, a few stale PR's that feel like game changers to the customers). But that's not a mentality modern social media rewards.

There is a comment above that shows the founding former didn’t want to fix tests in his PR. Flutter is massive and it’s critical infrastructure. The tests are critical to up-keep. The tests are probably a majority of the work. Which makes sense for something that has such a large surface area.

I think this is an emotional reaction from someone has never managed a large project. Merging PRs and releasing them isn’t the problem. I hope they understand that.

Flutter is amazing. Web, desktop and mobile that actually work is nearly magical. Yes there are priorities. Yes the desktop isn’t as high priority of web. It does work. Hell. Collect money and fund Hixie or others to prioritize patches community feel should go in. That is constructive and methodical/reproducible.

Forking a massive code base, applying PR and not conforming to the source repo standards (tests whether that is golden or not) - just seems not well thought out.

I think community could fund a well known developer to fix desktop issues and have PR adhere to Flutter standards. It’s a ton of work. But seems like it’s a money/dev/process issue. Not a PR merging exercise.

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