Why Is Node Being Forked? | Hacker News Reader

Why Is Node Being Forked?

dtrejo.com

76 pointsjohannh18 comments

Mikeal's response:

" @ddtrejo @izs @piscisaureus it’s a fork as in the GitHub fork button sense." https://mobile.twitter.com/mikeal/status/520285400279965698

This article acts as if they are going their own separate ways when this is clearly not the case.

Why did someone make a fork? Maybe to submit a patch? Maybe to have their own copy in case the origin decides to delete?

Please be accurate in your posts. Misreporting or misrepresenting puts you and your subject's professional reputations at risk.

I didn't find the actual content of the blog post particularly informative in itself, but there's plenty of indication that this is not just someone forking to submit a patch.

- https://github.com/node-forward is an organisation, not an individual and has put up various repositories centering around the forking effort.

- They have set up a website, http://nodeforward.org/ - which indicates (albeit with scant detail/background) that this is an independent effort to improve node.

- as zzmp pointed out, there is a fair bit of discussion around indicating some political discontent: https://github.com/node-forward/discussions/issues/7

The link in the post to the fork is dead, which leads me to believe maybe they reversed their decision to fork it.

The nodeforward site discusses improving documentation, build and test tools: http://nodeforward.org/

node-forward stated in their issues [1] that it's just politics. They've taken it private for the time being.

[1] https://github.com/node-forward/discussions/issues/7

Now I start to understand a coleague who don't recommend using Node before it gets mature.

It's kinda exciting for devs to use something that's actually still being built, but now we'll face different versions of the same tool. And, taking in consideration the oficial NodeJS will still be the one owned by the current BDFL, I fear this split of ideas actually inject problems for developers getting introduced to node.

I took a very brief look at node for a recent project, but decided that Erlang was way more mature and stable, albeit less trendy and with fewer libraries for it.

Been using node in production at work for 6 months, and 2 years in general with zero immaturity issues. The only downside is userland modules which seem stable and active now days.

Maybe Node will finally get a free operator now:

https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2012-October/0...

Seems like a bad idea in a garbage-collected environment. Based on a scan of that thread, it seems like folks would really like debugging ("who is holding on to refs for this?"). Java doesn't have "free" and seems to do pretty well with GC (one can use profilers and what not to instrument and see where memory is leaking, heap dumps can be taken if things get out of hand in production).

Node is going to be killed by politics and infighting, learn from what happened to craft bukkit.

How can a guy be "former Benevolent Dictator For Life"? Is he dead?

In 5 years, Node has had 3 BDFLs. Are there any other mainstream platforms with that kind of turnaround? I can't think of any.

It's just an expression, he stepped down: http://blog.nodejs.org/2014/01/15/the-next-phase-of-node-js/

If it's just an expression than maybe "forking" is also just an expression with a random meaning? Either that or he never was a BDFL.

"For Life" is in the same way that SCOTUS justices have an appointment "for life". It just means they can't be fired or deposed, not that they can only leave in a box.

isaacs passed on the reins to tjfontaine to focus on NPM instead: http://blog.nodejs.org/2014/01/15/the-next-phase-of-node-js/

One thing I don't understand is why isaacs didn't pass on the reins to a committee in the first place if that's what he wanted? Politics in the background? (I don't keep up with the Node community.)

Because you can't do pull requests?!

How's that Kickstarter and series A funding working out for ya?

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