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by BoumTAC 1412 days ago
I think this is a massive issue for both of you and I don't know how we can resolve it.

Because it's an issue for you because you don't have time to work on it and you can't always work for free.

But most people are on the other side. They work for a company and the company want them to use a package. But the package doesn't work or doesn't have the feature they need.

The can't fix it or add the feature because their company don't give them time to read thousand of line of code and fix the bug or even worse, they just don't have the skill for it. What are they suppose to do ? Their company will put pressure on them and they are stuck so they ask you to fix the bug/add the feature.

In the head of the manager the library is "famous", it is suppose to work and thousand of developer are using it. If it doesn't work it's because the company's developer is bad. But it's not his fault too. So everybody is in the same shit.

And it's a very recurring situation. I'm an average python developer, yesterday my task was to add celery to our django project. Celery is an old and massive "famous" project. It is suppose to work. But what happened when you follow the tutorial ? The tutorial doesn't work. What do I say to my manager ? Sorry the project sucks it doesn't work. He will not understand me. I had to follow another tutorial made by someone else and their install guide was different from the official one, and it kinda works. "Kinda" because it didn't work, to start Celery, celery needs to load the django settings. My django settings was using environment variable. It works for all of them except the django.SECRET_KEY. Why ? I have no idea, so I had to hardcoded the secret key in the settings which is not a good solution, but at least it works and I can progress on the feature I have to do.

What am I suppose to do ? Create an issue in celery asking for "please, can you fix your getting started because my company want me to use celery but it doesn't work ? Can you create a tutorial for using celery beat with django because my company want me to use it and I don't know how to do it ?"

Of course I didn't create an issue because I know I will not have an answer and it's always my fault because I can't debug the library for hours to find a solution to the shitty tutorial who doesn't work.

And that's just the type of the iceberg, I use all my day to make it work and I didn't manage to do it. I had to try different package, downgrade setuptools because one package wasn't compatible etc. At the end of the day, my environment was fucked up, django didn't even start anymore and I had to erase my environment and create a new one.

And that's the day of every average developer (so not HN developers). We get angry because nothing work, our company put pressure on use, and at the end, we ask coldly on github for bug fix or feature.

1 comments

Certainly this sounds like an issue for you and your company, but I don't see why it is an issue for the project and its maintainers. Many companies enter into support contracts with vendors whose solutions they adopt to avoid this very problem. The solution seems simple to me, your company should seek a support contract with the vendor, and if that is not possible, find a different solution for which they can. It is unreasonable to expect anything, especially in a business sense, from anyone who you are not paying to support you.
Because this is an issue with 99% of the companies.

Don't forget you are here on HN with HN developers. 99% of companies will never seek support contract with vendors. That's the reality, developers have to deal with it and get over the struggle. Maintainer have to deal with it too because companies will never change (or at least not in the few months) and get over developers asking for help which have issues with their library.

I suspect the maintainers will just ignore these kinds of requests, rather than "get over" them. If you and your company want help, you'll need to pay for it. That's the reality. If your company won't pay for it, then you'll have to "get over" your app not working.
That's what I said