| Another example:
You contribute for 10 years for opensource project.
Familiar with code, all of you fixed dozens of bugs.
Community grows, opened issues - shrinks.
Dynamic to close all major problems very soon.
And when you feel absolutely the safe, some motherfucker comes to a place, and offer: "Guys guys, let's switch our codebase from C to C++, because there are easier to work with strings, easier to work with pointers, easier to work with everything". And big community without listening anyone by decision of 2 guys from community of 100 devs - moving code base from C to C++. All that they doing - changing extension for files, and adding `extern C {` to files. Since that amount of bugs - increased dramatically.
Instead of fixing problems, there comes another dev and saying: "guys guys, lib-json too old, let's switch to modern and nice YAML".
Yea, does not need to care, that we already have GUI for working easily with ANY data in the repo, all perfectly tuned, and everyone used too. and boom - devs decide to switch to this bullshit. 5 years pass since these changes (since switching to CPP) What do we have now?
Community big slice of the communiy leaves from the scene.
Because this is impossible to maintain such mess
Another slice of community which is left - stay on codebase from 2017 without these changes. Project semi dead, impossible to revive it.
Why all of that happened?
Because of idiots who have permission to apply final decissions to repo.
Repo of community driven project. Where all things done by a community, but merged by owner of the repo. The project do not belong to the owner of the repo, the project belongs to community, the owner just in 2011 made a switch from SVN to github, and uploaded data there. Sometimes - douche-bags = owners of open source repos.
And as a guy who contributed to dozens of such projects, this is not "sometimes". This is - usually thing when guys on what rely community project - let the project die by doing nothing or doing wrong actions. |
I'm sorry to hear about your experiences. It sounds painful to see project(s) pivot like that, especially since you contributed so much to them.
What do you do now when you consider contributing to open-source projects?
What guidelines do you use to evaluate the maintainer's "ability to keep things on an even keel?"