Hacker News Reader

Comment by educar | Hacker News Reader

Long answer short: the maintainer has a vested interest in promoting harrow (his company).

I am sure there are many technical solutions to avoid the dependency.

I, for one, see no issue with this whatsoever. This is just a minor self-promotion in return for a great piece of software that I get for free. I wouldn't have known harrow before this otherwise. How is this any different from gmail or youtube or whatever which bombards us with bazillion ads using our data? Want to use the free software, put up with the ads.

Maybe the maintainer should make a paid version that removes this dep and see how many people are willing to fork up the money (my guess: very few).

View on HN

I appreciate your candor educar. I'm also on the fence with some software:

- iTerm2 prompted me to opt-in to some pre-beta phase, it was widely discussed on HN and the author was criticized.

- Just this week homebrew announced they integrated Google analytics to help understand their user behaviour and were called out and extensively critiqued.

- ohh-my-zsh frequently breaks my workflow to prompt me to ask about checking for updates, this is a thinly veiled "statistics" collection.. if I had a problem with my shell, I'd check for updates by hand, I'm a developer I can't work without my shell.

Those points fly in the face of the extreme freedom-of-software view, but if people don't want to use the latest version of Capistrano they can stick with the old version, or volunteer to back-port changes they care about and we'd be happy to release a dot-release with any bug fixes for a previous version.

Thanks also for the kind words in regard to Cap being "great software", as an infrastructure tool we have a privileged place in a hot, and potentially dangerous path for all our users, right between them, and their uptime! That trust is not lost on us, and we walk the line.

If people are concerned about the gem installation (and not the promotion itself), I can suggest that you promote harrow differently. Maybe put it as part of some command's output. Like "Cap by codebreaker (thanks to funding by Harrow.io)" or similar.

> If people are concerned about the gem installation (and not the promotion itself), I can suggest that you promote harrow differently. Maybe put it as part of some command's output. Like "Cap by codebreaker (thanks to funding by Harrow.io)" or similar.

Actually we wanted to ping people once not on every time they use the tool, this is the lesser evil, it also allows us to push something to turn off the integration without having to bump Capistrano's version for no reason, simply by deploying another (noop) version of the integration gem.

> I am sure there are many technical solutions to avoid the dependency.

It's trivial if you use a Gemfile: `gem "capistrano", "~> 3.4.0"` or `gem "capistrano", "3.4.1"`. You will stay on a version of Capistrano before 3.5.0. That's what I'm going to do, along with some more research into setting up Docker and something like Kubernetes for our deployments.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com