[HN Gopher] Mental Health in Open Source
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Mental Health in Open Source
Author : misonic
Score : 34 points
Date : 2024-03-16 16:26 UTC (6 hours ago)
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| PhilipRoman wrote:
| I'm fairly sure that it's possible to be a maintainer and not
| have to bend over backwards for some imagined "community". For
| the most part you can just accept patches, make decisions
| regarding the scope of the project and help with development on a
| best-effort basis.
|
| The default reply to a feature request should be "patches are
| welcome". If the software is useful, people won't hesitate to
| contribute fixes.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > patches are welcome
|
| That can get tiresome quite quickly. Sometimes you _do_ submit
| patches but they _still_ don 't give you the time of day.
| Sometimes they don't actually want your code. Sometimes they
| only accept code from some inner circle you're not part of. You
| might end up wasting a lot of time only to hit these walls and
| end up with zero results to show for your efforts. Then one day
| you might discover that the maintainer committed some
| suspiciously similar feature to the repository all by himself.
|
| People gotta stop acting like submitting code somehow elevates
| us above simple users. It really doesn't.
| PhilipRoman wrote:
| Yeah of course, if someone has sent a patch I would consider
| it a duty of the maintainer to review it, maybe rework a
| little if needed and commit with the necessary attribution.
| But I don't think it's the end of the world if a patch isn't
| accepted by the upstream. Assuming the pace of development
| isn't too fast it is not too much effort to maintain a
| friendly fork and occasionally rebase it.
|
| There is a fundamental difference between the duties of a
| maintainer and a developer. Just because some people are both
| doesn't mean they are the same thing.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| And that's what makes it not neccessarily less work at all
| to say "patches welcome", if you take that approach.
|
| Reviewing patches is real work, and often turns into
| mentoring/helping/directing the code, if you want to keep
| the software from turning into a ball of mess.
|
| (Or saying "no, patches not welcome for this one we won't
| be doing it", or "not unless you can find an elegant way to
| implement it, according to me")
|
| I don't find that reviewing patches (with all it entails as
| above) is often even less work than doing it yourself.
| smcleod wrote:
| Yeah I agree with this. You can only do want you can do and
| what you want to do. If there's more than you can or want to do
| - either pass it over to someone who wants to do it or don't do
| it.
|
| If people really want something beyond you means / energy they
| can submit a PR for it or fork your project.
|
| If you're tired of replying to everyone simply have a bot close
| duplicate issues and let people discuss among themselves in a
| forum to provide peer assistance.
|
| If its your baby and while you want to open source it you don't
| have any energy or desire to provide support/maintenance - just
| lock creating issues all together (not ideal, but if people
| have a community forum they'll be fine).
|
| If you're the only person that can review/fix/maintain
| something then you're part of the problem, not the solution and
| you might need to hand over to a wider audience or flat out
| remove yourself as a maintainer.
| lukan wrote:
| "Yeah I agree with this. You can only do want you can do and
| what you want to do"
|
| "If you're the only person that can review/fix/maintain
| something then you're part of the problem, not the solution
| and you might need to hand over to a wider audience or flat
| out remove yourself as a maintainer."
|
| How do those 2 parts go together?
|
| Because the first part is correct, I don't need to do
| anything. But if I open source something, meaning making a
| gift to the world, I totally can choose to maintain with as
| little effort as I want to. I also don't have to provide a
| forum - that is a project in itself and comes with legal
| liabilities.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| The worst part of programming for me is the loneliness. AI has
| been a huge help. Just having someone to bounce ideas off of is
| amazing. It's also been helping me quickly learn the internals of
| massive repositories so I can do what I want to do.
| polymatter wrote:
| How do you use AI to learn internals of massive repos? Surely
| the context is too big and/or it requires opening org code up
| and I'd never get approval for that. What LLM do you use?
| Lammy wrote:
| GitHub makes this unnecessarily worse by refusing to let you
| disable Pull Requests like one can disable the other social
| features (Wiki etc) of a repository: https://github.com/dear-
| github/dear-github/issues/84
|
| The workaround is to use GH Actions to auto-close PRs:
| https://github.com/marketplace/actions/repo-lockdown
| doubloon wrote:
| yup. it can be dangerous to mental and physical health like
| anything, if it is overdone. people have a hard time talking
| about it but i think the younger generations are thank god much
| more open to discussing this type of thing in public.
| swayvil wrote:
| Lots of free time, just me and my project. Every waking moment
| spent thinking about the project, solving the latest puzzle.
| (Because if the project is truly worthy then to give it anything
| less than my whole soul is absurd, right?).
|
| I do get weird. Sleep schedule starts spinning. Occasional
| hallucinations.
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