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Comment by pilif | Hacker News Reader

The title is a bit misleading. This is basically an announcement of a fork of Errbit that has Postgres support. Additionally, the fork was announced as an issue on errbit with no discussion or as an official pull request.

I would not consider this good etiquette. If you fork your project (especially without discussing the intention first), adding a bug to the original project isn't a very nice thing to do.

An official pull request would be nicer or, even better, don't bother the original project, but just announce your fork over other channels.

Even better would be to at least discuss the issue with the original project - maybe they agree and you can work together.

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>even better, don't bother the original project, but just announce your fork over other channels

This is a rather bizarre interpretation of nice behavior: Make a very cool modification to a project, but don't even bother to tell the original maintainers/authors?

Github Issues is a perfectly reasonable place for this. Maybe the mailing list would be better, but, shrug. Issues != Bugs, by the way. There's a reason it's called Issues. And it's basically the only way to have a discussion on github about anything whether it's an issue or not.

Also, some maintainers get mad if you send a pull request without doing an issue first, so there's no right way.

I disagree, I think that opening an issue on github is a good way to start a discussion about a feature. Many projects accept feature requests this way and if anyone did the same for one of my projects, this would be the way I would prefer them to handle it.

The thing is it sounds like he is just promoting his own fork he started 11 months ago, rather than "starting a discussion."

> We suggest to put errbit on PG. For those who want to try - the code here: https://github.com/Undev/errbit/tree/pg-upstream

The problem here is that the bad English grammar could have given the wrong impression. Maybe he is just saying:

"hey guys, you should consider migrating to postgresql. here's some code you can check out that has worked for us."

Rather than:

"hey guys, screw Errbit/MongoDB, use our fork!"

It seems that latter one is far better description of how people feels.

... after thouroughly testing it in production for 11 months and verifying that they had a point.

This is perfectly valid. A pull req might have been better, but this starts a discussion as well, and might prompt the project owner to say "Sounds great! Submit a pull request," or alternatively, "Sounds cool! We'll provide a link to your fork on our page." Both good.

Open source should encourage forking and easing the transmission of community from one fork to another.

There is nothing wrong with announcing a fork within the original's community. Where else would you announce it?

If you go back and look at it now, you'll see that this is a non-issue:

    @realmyst Will you put up a Pull Request?

    It sounds like MongoDB has no future indeed:   
    http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2013/11/11/why-you-should-never-use-mongodb/



   realmyst commented 19 minutes ago

   @21croissants yes, I will.

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