I will never understand people like GitHub user “shushtain” in the linked issue.
So obviously the guy is behaving like an entitled jerk, but it’s also surely counter-productive (volunteer maintainers are unlikely to respond well to plain rudeness)? Unless the goal isn’t a productive outcome, but just to be mean?
> They are just passionate and most of the times annoyed because something as simple is not being done right.
I don't think this is the case at all. You are commenting in a discussion on how a maintainer of an unstable project which very clearly and unambiguously only targets and supports a specific version of a runtime. Still, said maintainer is being pestered by entitled users who attack the maintainer and how they chose to invest their free time contributing to the project with accusations of being "insane".
This is not "passion". This is sheer entitlement, and abuse on top.
If this was passion, you'd see users contributing their work with proposals to post releases. Even very low effort things like forking the repo and posting their custom releases would be infinitely more productive. You know, the core of FLOSS.
But no. You have someone doing their best generously contributing their time to provide something to the public, and in return they get insults and abuse.
If those "many successful services" are FOSS, you are a very rare breed of developers - one I have not yet encountered in almost 30 years of FOSS development.
Could you please link some of your projects? I could use some inspiration how to deal with entitled FOSS users who do not understand that they already got much more than what they paid for.
I don't think you've done any of that - at least not for a successful open source project. The topic here is about open source volunteers and not your day job.
Don't take it personally but the people here are talking about open source projects and unpaid work in their free spare time. There is zero value you could share in this thread from your experiences on developing closed source business products because it completely misses the topic of volunteer work.
He's making a general point about "regardless of how something is presented to you, at the end of the day you have to look at the actual information, and if there is some truth in it, then it would be illogical to dismiss it".
at the end of the day you have to look at the actual information, and if there is some truth in it, then it would be illogical to dismiss it
sure, but the amount of nonsense (to avoid the b-word) i am willing to put up with depends on the amount of money i expect to make from the project. for unpaid work that amount is zero. if i am investing my free time and i allow you to benefit from it, you better be nice when you talk to me.
when i run a business then the information gained potentially makes my product sell better. for a volunteer project i may not care about popularity, so the information gained is not necessarily of any benefit.
I will listen to a rude paying customer if I must, because my income will be tied to it. If a similar paying customer comes and they are better behaved, the rude customer will take second position.
On an open source project that I’m doing for my own enjoyment rude people are not welcome. I’m doing that for my own enjoyment - to decompress after dealing with rude people. Close issue, won’t fix, ban free user.
> Unless the goal isn’t a productive outcome, but just to be mean?
Some people are just mean. They spend their angry little lives walking around "outraged" by any minor inconvenience. They assume every single little happenstance was designed to make them miserable.
The greatest thing about having a good education and working with other experts is that I generally don't meet this people that much, but I remember them all too well.
Agreed. However, I often wonder if people like that are deliberately (or inadvertently) being a psyop seeking to burn out people ala how "Jia Tan" tried to become maintainer of xz [0].
Easiest people to understand: someone hurt you (in this case disrupted your workflow, especially if pointlessly like this user thinks), you express the dissatisfaction to the person who did.
> Easiest people to understand: someone hurt you (in this case disrupted your workflow, especially if pointlessly like this user thinks), you express the dissatisfaction to the person who did.
Are you aware you are talking about a FLOSS project that was gifted to you, and you are advocating for attacking for abusing the creator of said project because you can't even bother to contribute anything back?
Think of the average person, in terms of communication skills, education, critical thinking, emotional regulation, etc. Now realize that half the population is below that.
If you're in a social bubble, which is hard to avoid nowadays, I recommend watching police body cam videos to help recalibrate where the ends of the spectrum are. It's also given me sympathy for police in general
Empathy goes both ways. You can recognize them being unfair while still appreciating their reasons for being unfair.
People seem to have this notion that there's some theoretical possible world where everything is completely moral, and we're just failing to get there. But that is not true. You get locally moral and globally moral arrangements, and they're not necessarily going to mesh. It's just like any other large system.
Guy can be justified from their perspective, people can be justified for distancing themselves from him. That's life. Having a reason for something is further the bare minimum, not the endgame.
The source of a library needs an update every time there is a configuration change in _any_ tree-sitter parser supported.
The only sustainable option is not use these helpers and manage editor dependencies manually: tree-sitter parsers, LSP servers (looking at you Mason), and plugins (looking at you neovim distros).
Managing the parsers yourself is fairly easy and could rely on running the tree-sitter CLI in each parser repo to build them. Other options exists like installing via Nix.
And in a similar vein, if queries (.scm files) were hosted in each parser repo, it would also be fairly easy to handle.
I think it’s the latter part with the query files that is the challenge here.
Queries are a part of tree-sitter, but unfortunately neovim extended those with more predicates and operators, making most nvim-sitter incompatible with tree-sitter API.
For my text editor I had to yank nvim-treesitter queries and rewrite them.
I think it would make a big difference even if the aggregation of queries was separated out into a separate repo from the other code, so that you can pin the code for installing and updating parsers while still being able to get updates to the queries, and it isn't as much of a problem if the installation code make major breaking changes (like requiring you to use 0.12)
Not really. If there are other maintainers who have ownership of the project they can just unarchive it themselves. If not, then he'd have to appoint a successor first, which would mean doing more work for free. So the best solution is just to archive it and let the community fork it if they're interested in continuing development.
Also your phrasing of "would be fine" implies that there are things that are not "fine" to do when doing work for free for the public benefit, which is exactly the sort of entitled attitude that makes many (myself included) uninterested in open sourcing their own projects.
Nvim treesitter is kind of taken for granted even if nvim maintainers say it's experimental. So I think the community will have to find a solution and replacement project.
I know Free and OpenSource software is only available thanks to maintainers who spend their time and money to make it available.
This type of sentence though, makes all I just mentioned easy to forget, when they take that tone with you.
But seriously, this is messed up. People need to learn to treat others with respect and kindness. Hopefully the maintainer is able to simply move on after archiving the repo, and isn't dealing with any mental struggles from dealing with years of entitled users demanding things for free.
In popular open source projects this is a recurring issue. I suspect the only way to deal with it is to either shift to a platform that has better tools for moderation, or end the project like the maintainer has done. Let someone else fork it and deal with the users.
To clason: Thank you for all the work you did maintaining nvim-treesitter!
Will this mean the end to NeoVim, whose main (one of) selling point is the tree-sitter out of the box? I hope not, as I am the long time user and supporter of the project.
Honestly this is just a case of open source software users expecting a free lunch. Firstly, the maintainers of this package don’t owe you anything, secondly the new version of neovim and treesitter-cli are already in Arch extra testing, and since they don’t break anything they’ll probably be in extra next week, so chill the fuck out.
If you have a problem with how open source works just please head back to vscode.
"dont be a shushtain" will now be part of my vocabulary.
honestly, i think one of the main reasons why large projects like kernel.org survive shushtains are guard dogs like linus torvalds. only if people have a decent amount of respect maintainers will actually scald them for saying smth utterly stupid, entitlement is kept at bay through being nudged towards going the extra mile themselves. after all, people do not apologize for acting entitled.
This is why I built nvim from source, and git pull plugins into the pack directory. I think it's even a static binary. Whatever changes I need I git pull. After they added LSP I have not wished for anything else really, so I stopped pulling. I think I pulled LSP completion API in 0.11 era but that's it.
Hate it when people break backwards compatibility. For me it's sacrosanct, more important than absolutely anything else.
I only have a handful of plugins so the system works well. And I have a 500 line init.vim (and no other config).
Some ecosystems like golang share this principle and so I can freely update packages without worrying about breakages. But other ecosystems(nvim, python, etc) I'm a lone warrior
83 comments
So obviously the guy is behaving like an entitled jerk, but it’s also surely counter-productive (volunteer maintainers are unlikely to respond well to plain rudeness)? Unless the goal isn’t a productive outcome, but just to be mean?
They are just passionate and most of the times annoyed because something as simple is not being done right.
> They are just passionate and most of the times annoyed because something as simple is not being done right.
I don't think this is the case at all. You are commenting in a discussion on how a maintainer of an unstable project which very clearly and unambiguously only targets and supports a specific version of a runtime. Still, said maintainer is being pestered by entitled users who attack the maintainer and how they chose to invest their free time contributing to the project with accusations of being "insane".
This is not "passion". This is sheer entitlement, and abuse on top.
If this was passion, you'd see users contributing their work with proposals to post releases. Even very low effort things like forking the repo and posting their custom releases would be infinitely more productive. You know, the core of FLOSS.
But no. You have someone doing their best generously contributing their time to provide something to the public, and in return they get insults and abuse.
No wonder projects get archived.
Could you please link some of your projects? I could use some inspiration how to deal with entitled FOSS users who do not understand that they already got much more than what they paid for.
Though many of my projects are completely free for the users.
Latest being this one already past 1000+ active users https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.macrocodex...
If you don't listen to your passionate users, i doubt you'll ever grow.
Someone being rude/entitled doesn't matter to me, I only care about if what they are saying actually makes any sense
He's making a general point about "regardless of how something is presented to you, at the end of the day you have to look at the actual information, and if there is some truth in it, then it would be illogical to dismiss it".
sure, but the amount of nonsense (to avoid the b-word) i am willing to put up with depends on the amount of money i expect to make from the project. for unpaid work that amount is zero. if i am investing my free time and i allow you to benefit from it, you better be nice when you talk to me.
when i run a business then the information gained potentially makes my product sell better. for a volunteer project i may not care about popularity, so the information gained is not necessarily of any benefit.
On an open source project that I’m doing for my own enjoyment rude people are not welcome. I’m doing that for my own enjoyment - to decompress after dealing with rude people. Close issue, won’t fix, ban free user.
++ izzat!!!
> They are just passionate and most of the times annoyed because something as simple is not being done right.
No, this is not adequate justification for such behavior towards volunteer FOSS maintainers.
1. He blames the maintainer that his distro doesn't ship latest neovim.
2. He didn't pull neovim from the Extra-Testing Arch branch.
3. He didn't pull neovim from AUR.
4. He doesn't have the knowledge to build from source.
5. He didn't pull the tarball from git.
6. He didn't pull the AppImage from git.
There's so many solutions to choose from and he chose none; pure ragebait.
> Unless the goal isn’t a productive outcome, but just to be mean?
Some people are just mean. They spend their angry little lives walking around "outraged" by any minor inconvenience. They assume every single little happenstance was designed to make them miserable.
The greatest thing about having a good education and working with other experts is that I generally don't meet this people that much, but I remember them all too well.
And most people who wronged me were never really rude to me. So i don't even use someone's rudeness as filter for anything.
[0] https://youtu.be/aoag03mSuXQ?t=597
> Easiest people to understand: someone hurt you (in this case disrupted your workflow, especially if pointlessly like this user thinks), you express the dissatisfaction to the person who did.
Are you aware you are talking about a FLOSS project that was gifted to you, and you are advocating for attacking for abusing the creator of said project because you can't even bother to contribute anything back?
If you're in a social bubble, which is hard to avoid nowadays, I recommend watching police body cam videos to help recalibrate where the ends of the spectrum are. It's also given me sympathy for police in general
People seem to have this notion that there's some theoretical possible world where everything is completely moral, and we're just failing to get there. But that is not true. You get locally moral and globally moral arrangements, and they're not necessarily going to mesh. It's just like any other large system.
Guy can be justified from their perspective, people can be justified for distancing themselves from him. That's life. Having a reason for something is further the bare minimum, not the endgame.
The source of a library needs an update every time there is a configuration change in _any_ tree-sitter parser supported.
The only sustainable option is not use these helpers and manage editor dependencies manually: tree-sitter parsers, LSP servers (looking at you Mason), and plugins (looking at you neovim distros).
And in a similar vein, if queries (.scm files) were hosted in each parser repo, it would also be fairly easy to handle.
I think it’s the latter part with the query files that is the challenge here.
For my text editor I had to yank nvim-treesitter queries and rewrite them.
https://github.com/ivanjermakov/hat-tree-sitter
Archiving a project which has other maintainers is an overreaction.
Also your phrasing of "would be fine" implies that there are things that are not "fine" to do when doing work for free for the public benefit, which is exactly the sort of entitled attitude that makes many (myself included) uninterested in open sourcing their own projects.
> since people apparently can't read
I know Free and OpenSource software is only available thanks to maintainers who spend their time and money to make it available. This type of sentence though, makes all I just mentioned easy to forget, when they take that tone with you.
My guess: People would freak out if FOSS maintainers actually did this.
I guess he really needed the latest ci/chore commits
But seriously, this is messed up. People need to learn to treat others with respect and kindness. Hopefully the maintainer is able to simply move on after archiving the repo, and isn't dealing with any mental struggles from dealing with years of entitled users demanding things for free.
In popular open source projects this is a recurring issue. I suspect the only way to deal with it is to either shift to a platform that has better tools for moderation, or end the project like the maintainer has done. Let someone else fork it and deal with the users.
To clason: Thank you for all the work you did maintaining nvim-treesitter!
If you have a problem with how open source works just please head back to vscode.
What to do as maintainer? Can everyone of them find piece?
Hate it when people break backwards compatibility. For me it's sacrosanct, more important than absolutely anything else.
I only have a handful of plugins so the system works well. And I have a 500 line init.vim (and no other config).
Some ecosystems like golang share this principle and so I can freely update packages without worrying about breakages. But other ecosystems(nvim, python, etc) I'm a lone warrior