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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

No one expects you to write perfect code, but we do expect you to fix flaws when you learn about them.

Looking at the postmortem[1], it looks like the patches provided were not good enough in the developer's eyes:

I believed it held mutable aliasing invariant and I was very happy that someone found real problem. I wanted to solve the problem, just with a bit of creativity. And use RefCell solution only if it would be not possible to solve it with any other way. Btw, I like the solution I found, it is in master and solves the problem at least one from the issue. If you want to push boundaries you have to touch this boundaries and sometimes you push too hard.

That sounds very much like the developer was headed to fixing them, but I guess the harassment and need for now won.

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Maybe that is what the developer intended, but afaik it is not what he communicated. What he communicated was a flat out dismissal of the issue along with the proposed fixes. Followed by deleting the whole issue from GitHub. To be fair, there were some very unpleasant things said in there, but he could have just deleted those and maybe locked the conversation telling people about his plans.

This whole thing was a feedback circle of increasing hostility between the community/contributors and this developer. At some points the developer was very unresponsive, leading to disappointment from the community, but then some very uncalled for personal attacks came from the community. I think the developer received some justified criticism, but I still understand his perspective, putting work in and getting abuse back sucks.

So, how fast do people expect developers of open source projects to respond before someone is considered unresponsive?

I'm not sure combining social media with code control is going to be such a good thing for a lot of developers who might not like to program in a fishbowl.

Expecting a reasonably-quick response to security concerns is certainly appropriate.

In a free project where the author isn't paid? What if he's on vacation? What's the SLA there? Is it reasonable to expect him to cut short the vacation?

If you want to be able to place expectations on the author, pay them and get a contract.

Then it is about communicating exactly this. Security and trust hinge on properly communicating what is going on.

What is reasonably-quick time wise?

That's like expecting your boss to double your salary because he is paying you salary. Opensource expectation should be in general if you are not happy feel free to fork and fix yourself. Then submit PR if you want to push your fix upstream.

But still so many PRs getting rejected, because they do not pass code review and usually it does not cause reporters of those failed PRs to open whole big flame discussion. That + overreaction on reddit was a last drop after which Nikolay decided to close the thing.

From what I saw, the problem wasn't response time but response tone.

If he'd said "I'll write my own solution" rather than calling it boring, his response wouldn't have been a problem.

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