Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by 2024throwaway 779 days ago
Open source maintainers don’t owe you the ability to see development process before the project was open sourced.

Squashing PRs is correct. Why would you need to see the hundred commits that lead to one working set of changes. The final changes are all that matter.
1 comments
imiric 779 days ago
Making a project open source is an invitation for anyone to use, change and contribute to it. Purposefully hiding the history of how it was built makes the work of not only future contributors, but of the original maintainer, more difficult. If someone wants to remove a feature, they need to cherry-pick it manually. If an experiment was done early on during prototyping and was scrapped, this information is lost. If someone wants to know why a piece of code exists, this information is lost.

Keeping a clean history of incremental atomic changes is the entire purpose of using version control. It's not just common courtesy that I as an entitled user feel like I'm "owed".

The same applies for PRs, but I won't get into it any further.

I feel like there's a vocal segment of developers who don't understand the benefit of atomic commits, and by extension, version control, and are strongly opinionated in favor of the lazy approach. Working with someone like that can be a frustrating experience.

But please continue to downvote me because you disagree. :)

link
LeafItAlone 779 days ago
To be honest, opinions like these are why it’s so draining to be an open source maintainer.

Some open source projects are just that - open source. You get the source and nothing else. You are not owed anything and you are not invited to collaborate and contribute. And that’s fine. Fork it and do things your way.

The community would be much more pleasant and healthier if casual passersby were not demanding things be done a certain way without actually caring about or contributing.

link
imiric 779 days ago
This goes beyond open source, though. Someone doing this would act the same way when working in a team in a closed source project as well. I'm just saying that it's unacceptable in either case.

Open source is about fostering a spirit of sharing and collaboration. If developers don't align with those ideals, maybe open sourcing their work isn't for them.

"Open source" is abused too often these days as a marketing term, or something to fluff up your CV with, when it should be anything but that.

link
2024throwaway 779 days ago
It sounds like maybe the open source ecosystem isn't for you, actually.

You don't get to dictate how others work, sorry.

link
2024throwaway 779 days ago
I personally open sourced a project that started life as a paid product. The repository contained proprietary/customer information.

Are you suggesting I should have made this private information public? Or that I shouldn't have released the project at all?

link
lolinder 779 days ago
As they said, open source maintainers don't owe you any of those nice conveniences you're missing with a clean commit history. If someone is embarrassed at their commit history or worried that they committed secrets at some point they're free to start clean and open source that. Don't put up artificial barriers to people releasing their code.

This fact (nothing is owed you) is entirely independent from the squash-or-not debate.

link