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Comment by zimbatm | Hacker News Reader

The best approach would be to put the harrow advertisement when installing the capistrano gem. Something in the lines of: "hey, if you want to support our work check out Harrow, we think you'll like it. `gem install capistrano-harrow`".

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That's pretty much what we did! The fact that the `capistrano-harrow` code is a dependency rather than being embedded into Capistrano itself was supposed to benefit people by allowing us to experiment with tasteful integrations without having to repeatedly bump `capistrano` every time we wanted to try something out. Having the integration in a tiny gem also makes it easier to audit for anyone who wants to know what exactly we're doing. It's regrettable that this has drawn such negativity about the process when it was intended to be better this way. Lesson learned, I suppose.

Please excuse the stray line numbers, but here's what the output looks like [1], the prompt respects the presence of a tty and defaults to no after a few seconds, and the prompt is only visible when running "cap install" (not "gem install capistrano")

Almost certainly this dependency will go away soon, not because of the negative comments on HN, but because silly as it sounds, I don't really like it anymore than anyone else does, I just need to apply a little pressure and see if the product we tried to build will find it's place in the market or not.

[1]: https://gist.github.com/leehambley/7c18c9760e5ec81f5181c018f...

Yeah it's fine, people get upset with silly things all the time. If you can move it into capistrano then they won't have the dependency argument and it will be good.

> I don't really like it anymore than anyone else does, I just need to apply a little pressure and see if the product we tried to build will find it's place in the market or not.

This does not sound like a great marketing strategy, more like a formula for pissing off users.

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