Ada Worcester 🏳️⚧️one thing the rsync thing is revealing is that the whole “rely on the sense of responsibility of some clever guys from decades ago” model of open source software maintenance is crumbling under load, and some people are seeing LLMs as an out
✧✦Catherine✦✧@pikhq I wish quitting was more acceptable
lil5You never hear anything about the dev’s that quit, those that continue on, create the survivorship bias.
Harsh Shandilya@lil5 @whitequark @pikhq As someone who quit a relatively visible project (https://github.com/android-password-store/Android-Password-Store/), it does get noticed.
Only after I shut everything down did people clock that the project was in dire straits, and one year later there's now a healthy fork at https://github.com/agrahn/Android-Password-Store which has more activity than the main project did for its last 2 years, and you're not seeing claude on every commit.
poetaster@msfjarvis so the solution is shutter the project until people notice?
@poetaster Why not? If it's no longer within your abilities or desires to work on it, why try to maintain an illusion that things are all sunshine and rainbows?
I spent a lot of time pretending that I could still keep the project going when that simply wasn't the case, and if I was honest to myself I would've done it about 2 years sooner than I actually did. Things worked out in that the current maintainer showed up around 5-6 months before archiving, and decided to take it in a good direction.
@msfjarvis sure I get it. I took over a number of projects from a person who got overwhelmed and understood why he wanted to 'shutter' it. In that case, however he had users, no public repos, etc. If I had not come along, the software would have disappeared. Ok, so what, in a sense. If it does not matter to others, I guess. In the community I am part of, there is a common, group gh, I'm gradually moving things to to avoid the issue.
@msfjarvis I should add you are right that one needs to check the ego thing. I do sometimes get ego involved in projects which is very not future proof!