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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

In this case, the maintainer made an active and conscious decision to do something that did nothing but hurt everyone using the project. There are no passengers who might benefit here, sadly.

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Since this seems to be a constant point in this thread but I don't see it: How exactly did that person hurt anybody? They maintained this project for 3(?) years and the code is readily available elsewhere on github now. If there's really that many people being inconvenienced by that, surely somebody else will take over that fork instead.

This person killed the momentum that this project had, much of which was only partly their work. Forks fracture a project’s community and pit the pieces against each other: occasionally they work out, but often they all just fizzle into nothingness. Keeping a project together has value. (Also, note that associated GitHub metadata such as issues has been wiped.)

Reading the description in the root of that project, the community and user base might just as well be attributed to "killing the momentum" if you like (if that's even the case, this seemed to have happened literally hours ago). The issues seem to be intact on the maintainers personal copy of that repository.

I mean, yes, keeping a project together has value, I just don't see where the assumption here comes from that this maintainer has to do that indefinitely or even has to be involved in actively searching for successors in a community they don't feel good about. The maintainer even states being open to suggestions. If nobody steps up, momentum can't have been that great, if somebody does, a fork will live on. That's still in the realm of mild inconvenience, other projects have survived much larger controversy.

edit: the frontpage is currently topped by a more balanced write-up by Steve Klabnik that weighs up, among others, both of these views https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22075076

> I just don't see where the assumption here comes from that this maintainer has to do that indefinitely or even has to be involved in actively searching for successors in a community they don't feel good about

Of course they don’t. But I don’t see why they couldn’t have made an issue along the lines of “I’m stepping down, I’d like someone else to take over the project”. (Still reading through the other writeup.)

What do you mean wiped? It was moved to personal account https://github.com/fafhrd91/actix-web.

I was under the impression that that repository was probably going to be deleted at some point.

I think you are confused. The maintainer made an active and conscious decision to protect himself. That's clearly not "nothing", and a perfectly legitimate reason.

They're referring to the maintainer's conscious decision to reject a patch made in good faith, that fixed the issues that had been pointed out. It was rejected with the statement "this is boring." Do you think this behaviour is justifiable?

> I think you are confused

You sure?

It is if your the one maintaining it. It's not like people are paying the person to accept their patches. If they want their patch applied they can fork the project. The maintainer isn't a slave to others.

Under what obligation does the maintainer NEED to accept any patch? It's his project he built. He can build or destroy his work as he sees fit. If you have an issue fork it. This is how things like libreoffice, mariadb, and countless other projects have come to exist.

> They're referring to the maintainer's conscious decision to reject a patch made in good faith, that fixed the issues that had been pointed out.

You're misrepresenting the problem. There was never a bug or an issue, only a bunch of opinionated and vocal users who thought that bullying a maintainer is an acceptable way to get him to accept their patches. The maintainer rejected the bullies' actions and in turn the bullies ramped up their attacks, which ultimately convinced the maintainer that closing up shop is the best way to stop having to deal with these bullies.

> You're misrepresenting the problem. There was never a bug or an issue

The story originated from the author of this article [0] posting a bug report issue [1].

Why are you accusing others of misrepresenting the problem while doing so yourself?

0: https://medium.com/@shnatsel/smoke-testing-rust-http-clients...

1: https://archive.is/BEqfM

Please stick with the facts and thus with primary sources. Part of the blame of this shitstorm lies in those who insist in misrepresenting the problem with bullshit blog posts and "he said she said" nonsense.

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/epszt7/actixnet_unsou...

Unfortunately this is not the first time Rust soundness/unsafe zealots are aggressive and create shitstorms in the community.

I linked to an archive of the GitHub issue in question and the reporter's own blog article about it. Are those not primary sources? And you've linked to Reddit?

I think there are a number of ways the maintainer could have protected themselves without making it actively worse for the community. I would even predict that this decision makes them likely to get even more abuse, though of course I would never condone that.

> I think there are a number of ways the maintainer could have protected themselves without making it actively worse for the community.

If said community was the one causing the problem, what would be the point of that?

The community is not a monolithic entity.

If there are bad apples in the community then the good apples need to speak up and reject them.

Otherwise the bad apples are the apples.

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