Greg KnaussI propose a day, once a quarter, where the team maintaining an open source project sits down with a new user and silently watches them try to compile it, using only the instructions on the website.
Chris Ferdinandi@gknauss OSS maintainers don’t owe anyone anything.
Jacob Christian Munch-Andersen@cferdinandi @gknauss Principally I agree, I just don't ever want to use a project by someone who says that unprovoked.
@NohatCoder @gknauss I think the expectation that you should be able to find whatever OSS package you want, ready-to-use with support, for free, is a great failing of our industry.
Plenty of great "starting point code" sitting out there in projects that where released out-of-kindness by the creator who has zero interest in maintaining it.
The world would be worse off if they just kept it to themselves.
@cferdinandi @gknauss Ok, you got right to our disagreement. Starting point code is worthless. Someone else's half-baked attempt at doing something that wasn't quite what I needed in the first place is worthless. In some cases it may be negative value because my initial assessment was wrong, and trying to fix it simply cost time that could have been spent on my own code or searching for a better baseline.
"Someone else's half-baked attempt at doing something"
Oh the ego! Who says its half baked? Who says it's bad? Feature incomplete isn't "half baked".
Sounds like you'd be better off just coding everything yourself from scratch.
@cferdinandi @gknauss I code a lot of things from scratch, some of it end up as open source projects, and I would hate for those projects to waste other people's time.
Feature incomplete, half baked, no support. Call it what you will, I have never seen a project of that type that isn't a waste of time.
Have you got any examples? Ever found that piece of abandoned code that just needed a paint job?
@NohatCoder @gknauss Way to invalidate an entire genre of "I had this problem and this solved it for me and maybe you can adapt to your needs to" code shared on the internet.
GTFO out of my mentions, dude. I'm done.
@cferdinandi @gknauss Thanks for the block, I ask for one example and you can't provide, so GTFO to you too.