[PaulRobinson]

So why not fix that? You can absolutely build a binary and release it and save thousands of people that effort.

Comments like this remind me of people who complain about an error they saw on Wikipedia: "So, you're going to fix that, right?"

If you have a pain point in OSS that you care about, you can fix that. Yes, you the person reading these words right now. That's the entire point of OSS.

[n144q]

I could, but nobody is going to trust my binary. And they shouldn't.

The build should come from the official maintainer. Period.

And participating in open source? Oh, I can assure you I am a seasoned open source contributor, but I am not going to just contribute to a random project. Wasted too much time on issues and pull requests that nobody looked at.

Easy to criticize other people, right? What have you done?

[PaulRobinson]

So help the official maintainer. Become the official maintainer of the Windows build.

If you don't want to, or can't be bothered with the time commitment, that's fine, but realise that every time you complain about an OSS project's failings, you're really complaining about your own inability to contribute, not their's.

[n144q]

my "own inability to contribute"

Wow, didn't expect someone to pull off such accusations so quickly the SECOND time.

I probably wrote more code in pull requests than your HN comments combined.

[PaulRobinson]

You're taking offence where none was intended. I was not referring to competence, as I have no means to judge, your inability was a reference to your decision to not to contribute for whatever reason you have chosen.

You've made clear that you are not going to do this. Fine. My point is that this failing you perceive then, is about your decision/inability/choice/forced situation/whatever you want to call it, to not fix it, not theirs.

If you're anywhere near as experienced as you state you are at maintaining OSS projects, you'll know the issue I'm referring to here: entitled armchair quarterbacks telling maintainers what they "should" be doing, but not doing anything to contribute themselves.

Your original remark was that kind of entitled snide, back-handed, snarky comment that deflates OSS maintainers every day.

Engage with it, or accept that's where it is. Don't race around pointing out all the things it doesn't do that you want, that you're not prepared to make happen. You could offer time, you could offer actual hard cash, you could just move on and decide not to care.

That's my point. If you have maintained OSS, you know that's the point, I even contextualised it with an easy to understand metaphor in the form of "broken things" on Wikipedia that literally take seconds to fix.

If you didn't get that on the first or second pass, perhaps you're not quite the experienced maintainer you claim to be, in which case, just hold off criticising for a beat next time, and think about what you could actually do, and if it's nothing that's fine. Move on.

[Aeolun]

You haven’t really refuted his point though?

Which is that you are complaining about something you claim to be perfectly capable of yourself.

It’s not about how much you contributed elsewhere. It’s about how much you contributed to the thing you take issue with.

I get your point though, but maybe a discussion instead of an out of the blue pull request would work better.

[n144q]

If Zed wants to treat Windows as a second class citizen, I don't want to change their mind. I am sure plenty of people other than me are willing to help and have the ability to contribute. The fact that there is no official build for Windows for so long says plenty about the project. The writing is on the wall.

I am not an idiot. Recent developments in the open source world should already give everybody a better idea of where they should spend their time and energy.