taco, bird/cat 20h ago

open source software developers are getting fed up and are finally recognizing that they can just fucking leave.

  • the owner of nvim-treesitter gets a really shitty comment from a user saying that the update to a required version broke their workflow
  • the owner replies saying "hey just pin what you need instead of mainlining it if you need this for an older version"
  • the shitty user replies back saying "go switch to something that doesn't require interacting with people"
  • the owner says "OK." and ARCHIVES THE REPO

https://github.com/nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter/discussions/8627

like, holy shit, what a power move.

Show threadlia19h ago

@chirpbirb To be fair, making an at least somewhat functional plugin crash on some versions just because you don't officially support them is quite hostile and practically malware.

Of course they can maintain whatever versions they want, and the other guy is a dick, but deliberately making it crash when users use it "wrong" is quite toxic. Especially for something as essential as a text editor. Livelihoods could be at stake 

Show threaddrbrain12h ago
@lianna @chirpbirb as an eight year maintainer of a packaging tool for a popular programming language there is no fully acceptable way to deprecate features. Someone will loudly, annoyingly complain no matter what path is chosen. From my multiple personal experiences attempting this I will never fault a maintainer’s choice
Show threadlia11h ago
@drbrain @chirpbirb I mean, not going ahead actively putting effort into implementing sabotage features to crash setups is pretty easy. The ideal – if not perfect – solution would probably have been a deprecation warning and that's it.
Show threaddrbrain

@lianna @chirpbirb warnings gave no fewer annoyed users and, when it was time to remove the functionality, the same types of complaints that lead to nvim-treesitter being archived

“You were warned” did not stop them, plus I had to deal with complaints about the warning for N extra months during the warning period

4:18amIvory for iOS