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by falsedan 3266 days ago
> i don't think the Jenkins developers are interested in it either

I keep running into this: we want to extend or change Jenkins behaviour, and since it's open-source, it's possible to get up-to-speed on the codebase & make that change. But getting it into a state which matches the mindset of the project maintainers is tough! Trying to convince someone that your use-case is not only permissible but is actually a good idea over ticket comments is not what we want to spend our time on.
2 comments
kohsuke 3266 days ago
I'm the creator of Jenkins.

Without fully knowing the context, I wonder if this is just a simple disconnect.

In Jenkins, we collectively cover wide-ranging use cases not by making one existing plugin (say Git plugin) do everything, but by making it extensible so that other people can define additional semantics and behaviours as separate plugins on top of it.

We learned this in the early days of Subversion plugin, back when that was the most popular version control system. Everyone uses a generic tool like that very differently, so as we kept adding individually valid use cases to the Subversion plugin, it became this giant hair ball not just for devs but also for users.

This mode also works better for those who do not want to spend time explaining why their use case is a good/important one, as they can simply code up their idea as a separate plugin and move on.

With all that said, I'm sorry for the frustration you had. Do you still have some pointers to tickets/PRs, etc? I'd like to look into it.

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falsedan 3266 days ago
Hi, thanks for responding!

Funnily enough, I'm specifically thinking of the Git plugin and issues like https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-6124 & https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-14572, and Nicholas de Loof's comments 'ur doin it wrong'. It's extremely difficult to extend this plugin; we have a lot of work tracking all the existing plugins we use, and adding maintenance of our own plugin on top of that is work we don't want to do.

Nowadays we try to keep as little as possible defined in jenkins configs and put our build & test logic in makefiles/tools.

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mugsie 3266 days ago
Yeah - it is a "problem"[0] with open source - you need to deal with people that may have completely objectives to you.

It is easier with a closed source / paid service to ask for feature requests. Remember that the maintainers probably get hundreds of similar requests a week, and have merged things in the past that they didn't like and later caused issues.

This causes confirmation bias for them "The last time we allowed code not aligned to codeing styles / test requirements / feature direction / $reason it all went badly", so it is easier to ask for things to align to their world view before merging it.

Being a maintainer is hard - you are damned if you do, and damned if you don't. People give out about not merging code, but they also give out if the code that does get merged breaks things. Finding a balance is hard.

0 - I don't personally think it is a problem, but it potentially requires a bigger time investment, and can be infuriating when you have a small change that really scratches an itch for you.

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