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Comment by thinkt4nk | Hacker News Reader

harmful?

It's a play on the classic Dijkstra letter, "Goto Considered Harmful." Also yes, I think it's harmful. A co-worker and I wanted to use a new up and coming FOSS project that's hosted on GitHub, but we needed a certain killer feature. Said co-worker worked for about 4 weekends in a row, and fully implemented it, with nice abstraction and separation of concerns. The code was then turned down because it was "too seperated, and unnessecarily abstracted" which we disagreed with. Thus the pull request, with an amazing feature, sits languishing because he nor I is going to spend another few weekends working on a project that won't integrate new features unless they're perfect and conform to the original author's idea of "perfect code".

Translation: "My co-worker wrote a clusterfuck of indirection spaghetti and the open-source volunteer refused to maintain it!"

Every PR that adds a feature adds future support and maintenance effort. If you and your buddy are unwilling to spend the time to get it right, why are you expecting the maintainer to spend the time to support it?

In short, it was a perfect implementation of adding support for dynamically updating scripts via NuGet for a C# port of HuBot by typing "<robotName> update-scripts". This is the standard way of managing dependencies, and would mean not having to manually upload scripts to a folder restart the bot every time you need to add or change the scripts.

The maintainer shortly thereafter attempted to do it himself his way, ended up with a bug-ridden and memory-leaking implementation that barely worked, and sits languishing in a lonely branch.

Don't make assumptions about the code you didn't see and the attitudes involved coders might have. We would have been (and still would be) more than happy to help maintain it had the bot turned out useful for us, but because it was a new project and the structure was changing constantly, attempting to fork and integrate upstream changes would have been a nightmare, so we decided to go a different direction.

So what you have is a fork, with a fully implemented feature, that didn't make it back upstream.

This happens all the time, and is the nature of open source. No project is obligated to take your contribution, and that happens for a myriad of reasons that you are not obligated to understand.

It's fundamentally a human problem, not a software one. There's nothing wrong with the software here—it does everything required and more to be able to manage the codebase.

Take your fork, explain the situation in the README and let it be. It'll be in the fork graph and the list on Github. People can find it. If they like your feature, maybe they'll use yours instead. If enough people get behind it and ask for it, or say "hey this was in a PR, why wasn't it merged?", the pressure could be enough for the original author to just accept the PR.

In any case, this is not a problem with the pull request feature. It's a simple collaboration problem, and a PR is only one method of communication you can use to solve it. If you give up after throwing a PR into the void (not that I'm saying you did), you shouldn't expect instant success.

The right way to do this is to talk to the maintainer about how he wants the feature implemented first. Especially if it involves four weekends of work.

Depends on the size of the feature, and the maintainer, but you're right about "talk to the maintainter."

Some projects, you'll want to do a weekend of really rough work, contact the maintainer, get their thoughts. Others, you'll want to do 8 days work, get it far enough along to show, get their thoughts.

Often though, before you write a line of code, talk to them.

We did, he explained it, then implemented it himself, and it was a bug-ridden, memory-leaking piece of shit that isn't merged in either.

I was once on the other side of this. A nice guy wrote a whole ton of code for a module, refactored things to the max, made it "testable" and a bunch of other things. He was very nice, very enthusiastic, and really wanted to help.

But I had to say no because it didn't fit well within the overall project, and didn't really add any value but a lot of complexity. I felt very bad to turn him down but otherwise I'd be now responsible for code I have no interest in and code I don't feel helps users.

The right way is to talk to the maintainer and agree on what to do first. Or be prepared to run a fork.

It's a meme, sort of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful.

A more precise term would probably be snowclone.

Like all memes, it is mindlessly implemented to look "cool" or "clever".

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