Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@jflemer-ndp
Last active April 16, 2020 16:00
Show Gist options
  • Star 0 You must be signed in to star a gist
  • Fork 0 You must be signed in to fork a gist
  • Save jflemer-ndp/c409105564006a6815f6e636a26b6533 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save jflemer-ndp/c409105564006a6815f6e636a26b6533 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Open source let down
Subject: Re: poise-python maintainer
To: James Flemer <james.flemer@ndpgroup.com>
From: Noah Kantrowitz <noah@coderanger.net>
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2019 12:21:21 -0700
To put it more bluntly: 1) I don't believe you can maintain it 2) I have
no reason to trust you.
It has nothing to do with being an open-source proponent, it's about
responsibility to end users. Sometimes to best thing to do is let things
die. I recommend you do the same.
--Noah
James Flemer wrote on 7/12/19 12:12 PM:
> Wow, bummer. From your blog, it seemed you were much more of an
> open-source proponent. Seems counter intuitive to turn down community
> support if you're no longer interested in maintaining it yourself. And I
> agree that none of the forks can maintain it, but not because of skill,
> CI, or commitment, but rather because as long as you hold on tight to
> the "poise-python" name, people will keep hitting your old & busted
> version and it will be very hard for a single clear "master" (fork) to
> emerge.
>
> Regards,
>
> James Flemer
>
> NDP
> 1909 26th Street, Suite 1E
> Boulder, Colorado 80302
> james.flemer@ndpgroup.com
> www.ndpgroup.com
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 12, 2019 at 1:04 PM Noah Kantrowitz <noah@coderanger.net
> <mailto:noah@coderanger.net>> wrote:
>
> I don't think any of the forks can reasonably maintain things. Poise
> itself will likely break over time as it touches a shit-ton of Chef
> internals. Also my CI system for it is probably no longer
> operational as
> Rackspace is planning to terminate their support for open-source
> projects and I don't really feel like rebuilding it elsewhere (or
> paying
> $1k a month for a server to run it on). My whole fleet of libraries was
> never really set up for anyone else to manage, and I suspect the best
> you can do is keep it on life support for new pip versions. I don't see
> much value in that. While I'm sure you mean well, I don't really have
> any way to vet specific maintainers as to if they can be trusted so I
> don't really see that as a path forward.
>
> I would strongly recommend switching to a dramatically simpler cookbook
> instead.
>
> --Noah
>
> James Flemer wrote on 7/12/19 11:59 AM:
> > Hey Noah,
> >
> > Are you looking for a maintainer for poise-python? Would you be open to
> > un-archiving it and opening up commit to others (and supermarket)?
> >
> > Obviously one can fork it and continue dev. But that would mean
> > re-naming it and likely a fractured community. There are already 13
> > forks (including mine).
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > James Flemer
> >
> > NDP
> > 1909 26th Street, Suite 1E
> > Boulder, Colorado 80302
> > james.flemer@ndpgroup.com
> > www.ndpgroup.com

@coderanger commented 15 Apr 2020 5:13PM MDT

@jflemer-ndp I think you fundamentally misunderstand the goals here. The primary goal is a unified experience for all platforms and users. Interaction with system trust stores is not impossible with that goal, but it requires far more thought and complexity than you have put into this. As experts have now many times to you, ignoring every use case but your own is not helpful in broadly-used software.

I hope you will learn from this in your future interactions with open source communities and be less presumptive, listen more, and generally be less of the kind of person that makes us all want to stop doing open source.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment