I also hate the ai slop but on the flip slide this maintainer has been asking for help for years and dosent receive much in the discord. I also want quality code but don’t jump to demonize a volunteer especially when not many have jumped in to help
If the author used AI for small, well-reviewed maintenance changes, that would be okay. But instead he is making large and sweeping changes that are entirely uncalled for and cause breakage.
If the maintainer is overworked, that is even more reason not to do this.
As far as I can tell, most of the AI-assisted changes were security fixes and test-suite related, and I'm sure you can agree that both of those are normal maintenance.
As an example, the entire test suite was recently vibe-replaced. An essential component for reliability and stability. And you can already see the results in the decreased stability and increased defect count.
It was (and is) not: rsync has over 300 open issues with bugs and feature requests.
2. Of course bugs should be fixed. I even say so in the comment you replied to. You are attacking a strawman.
3. People will always make feature requests. Some want rsync to be able to make a sandwich. That is not really in-scope for the project though.
I think the GNU coreutils are doing this largely right. New features are almost never added. ls, for example, is pretty much complete, and too foundational to mess around with. If you need fancy new features, use something like eza.
If you think that fixing security issues is "unnecessary changes", maybe.
Though maybe security is not "in-scope" for you?
> That is not really in-scope for the project though.
Why do you decide what is in scope for the rsync project and what not?
Apparently the maintainer disagrees and also wants to fix existing security issues.
> Why do you decide what is in scope for the rsync project and what not?
If you are arguing for making sandwiches being in scope for rsync, you proved that you are just a troll. We have reached the end of reasonable discussion.
Perhaps there's people that don't consider it complete software; they can bear the burden of the new releases while you stay on the old and complete one. This has been normal software release and use practice for decades. Whole Linux distributions are built around different philosophies on software releases.
And yet you're making an argument as if this is something novel...