(Disclosure: while I haven't talked with him in years, Tridge was my colleague and mentor for many years. I feel it is worth considering his view before joining a crusade)
> I thought it would be a good idea to do the core structure for the new test suite in public on master first though given all the rage that has generated maybe that was a bad idea.
I don't entirely understand what this is saying. People wouldn't have been outraged if only the tests had been updated and/or he pushed solely on master - but he pushed breaking changes onto the release branch(es) too. Breaking workflows that have worked for years is a prime way to get people irate, and then seeing "Claude" in the commits just pours gasoline onto the fire.
It seems that wasn't the Claude part, though I haven't seen a full analysis of exactly what broke. I also only saw one report: are there multiple, or do you just perceive that?
Rsync has many options: I can totally believe that fixing a bug in one place broke someone's usage, to be fair.
"yes, there were regressions in some use cases of rsync in the 3.4.3 release. I quite deliberately tried to err on the side of fixing security issues for that release, and there were some valid (but unusual) use cases that got caught up in the changes"
Yeah a big reason you see so much pushback on clanker slop is that it's having (and there was certainly the expectation of it having) a negative impact on the ability of plenty of people to pay their bills.
The title at least sounds less like judgement and more analysis and more about AI assistance (and claude in particular) than rsync. Maybe I am too used to postmortems!
> Now if any of the people posting the rage stuff want to actually review any of the code I’ve published and make constructive criticisms then that would be great!
When you quickly churn more lines of code in a few days than you changed in months, and then release them as a normal, not sure you're expecting "constructive criticism"
Also if I suspect the project is just slopping high amount of code without proper thought, I probably won't invest my time into reading those changes
I get that there's a lot of loud nonsense flying around about AI, both positive and negative, and I echo the sentiment that people should have some damn perspective when talking to FOSS maintainers, but I think writing a bunch of AI-assisted code that causes regressions and then responding to that by throwing out a strawman about how critics (with PhDs no less!) are telling him these things can't do anything at all and can't possibly understand how literally everything has fundamentally changed in the last few months sounds way more like a guy who has a motivated (and understandable - he's retired ffs) reason to... a little bit buy into the hype
I think he makes a lot of good points here, but also think that kind of statement is unlikely to assuage the real concerns of people using the software. I think people are more likely to fork rsync now rather than rely on a more diverged earlier alternative implementation though
I don't entirely understand what this is saying. People wouldn't have been outraged if only the tests had been updated and/or he pushed solely on master - but he pushed breaking changes onto the release branch(es) too. Breaking workflows that have worked for years is a prime way to get people irate, and then seeing "Claude" in the commits just pours gasoline onto the fire.