Pet peeve: People complaining about the way I maintain my open source projects under MIT license (particularly my decision to use stale bot, since I don't like seeing literal thousands of open issues across my repos).
Just fork it! No skin off my back. https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/just-say-no
@geerlingguy There is a distinct difference between a timeout based stale bot and saying no to an issue. With the former you ensure I will probably never contribute to your things again, with the latter I am still happy to help
From a fellow opensource maintainer and contributor.
@darix @geerlingguy timeout based bots are the only thing making sense once a project gains a lot of users. Ppl ask for features and never respond once you spend the time to implement them.
If a requester does not have 1 minute to send a short message I do not have the time to implement the feature.
Bugs are excepted from the stale bot of course.
@darix fine by me!
I often post a PR to a project with zero expectations whatsoever.
The only reason I post it is so (a) I can incorporate that into my own documentation or fork, and (b) so others who use the project can benefit.
If anyone on the project ever decides to merge my code, that's just icing on the cake.
That's why you should have some sort of "work in progress" flag/tag/state. There's a difference between an issue being worked on without being updated and an issue being ignored/not worked on.
Ideally, you'd put the issue id in the commit message, so it's clear what's going on.
But I have to admit, splitting discussing an issue and working on an issue into two different places is not ideal.
@AdmSnackbar @darix my stale bot configuration has a pass for bug and "planned" labels.
But I apply those labels sparingly. I don't close bugs, but I often close feature requests. The projects are first and foremost for me, if others benefit from my code that's great.
Aha Jeff’s making this stuff and giving it away for free. I’d imagine sometimes just in case someone else finds it interesting..
It’s not really up to Jeff to do anything. He could log out of GitHub and never log back in ever again, and that would be his choice. I’m sure if there’s a project you really need changed, you’ll be able to pay another dev to fork it and do whatever you are after…. Or reach out and offer to pay Jeff. Much love,no h8
Hi Darix,
Sorry I didn’t mean to offend. I actually hit the character limit. I’m really just trying to say that not all those who upload code to GitHub publically are necessarily planning to upkeep or maintain it for others nor do they really have to. I seriously applaud you if you have been maintaining projects off your own back for 25+ years just for the people!
You are doing gods work dude. Again I did not mean to offend and I’m sorry!
That’s fair enough of a take. I see what you’re getting at. Again I still think the open part of open source means I could create a project, make it public and then just start introducing bugs and breaking features people use on purpose just to piss people off. That’d be within my rights.. it’d also make me a dick of course 🤣
I just think anything on GitHub with an mit or other permissive license is up to the owner to just do whatever with.
@Nadsec @geerlingguy all of it is true. you can break shit as much as you want. And people do plenty of that. I have no problem with that TBH.
But bug closing bot just means it looks like your project has no issues, while the known issues list might be really long.
Guess how happy an user will be if they find out later "oh the project with no open bugs, that looked like well maintained, is just hiding the bugs with a stale timeout bot"
Appreciate you explaining further, what you’re saying checks out and I feel like I’ve learnt something! Cheers
I think in Jeff’s case he’s quite well known publically obviously. So I do think this is a bit of an edge case with a fella stuck between a rock and hard place. Anyways let’s agree to disagree or whatever it is we’re doing here 🤣 appreciate the insights! Open source is an ever evolving beast in and of itself.
> Unless it's generating income, it's for me and I'm not gonna spend more than a couple hours a month looking at it—if that.
I love that phrase.
In 2023 I went through my side projects and automated things which were taking my time and were easy to automate: https://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/2023/10/28/automating-some-of-my-personal-projects/
Now those projects require few minutes per month or less.
@hughsie @geerlingguy I don't know what they're complaining about, it's leagues better than a bunch of enterprise software where you have to literally pay for the privilege to get to have your issues silently thrown in the bin.
Open-source projects with a stale bot will at least do you the courtesy of telling you.
Honestly, don’t take it too personally. A lot of people don’t actually get that there may well be one guy mainting their fun open source project and have decided to make it public out of the kindness of your heart..
Also a lot of us on this industry have asburgers and things like that. It’s worth considering some of these people commenting may well be on the spectrum in some form or have some sort of social problems.
Nah Jeff, you’re not busy. Surely just vet fix all 10000 requests…cmon man. Not willing to give you any money, but cmon just do the work!
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