Comment by sureIy 2 months ago
On a related note: the worst thing you can possibly do as an open source developer is to create a product for the general public to use.
You hate tickets without repro? Enjoy the barrage of “help. Doent work”, “me too” and “HELLO IT’S BEEN 3 DAYS” messages.
You can restrict issue creation/comments etc to certain users if you don’t want to open it to the public. You can also use a separate repo: https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/creating-and-managin...
It’s a choice the maintainer has to make.
To me this is mostly self inflicted pain…
Yes and no.
Sure, countermeasures exist, but the issue is that you first need to be aware of what exactly the problem is before you can take these countermeasures.
The reality however is that people just hear "You should do GitHub" and then for some inexplicable reason slowly descend into feeling bad without any clear reason why. After all, they're following all the "best practices" laid out by people that clearly know what they're doing and surely have their best interest in mind.
I think you’ve just argued that devs have a lack of knowledge and just do what other people do with very little agency of their own, despite all the controls being available to them to them to solve problems. I agree with you. Devs need to be stronger willed and have more self respect. You can’t wait for rando users to stop being a-holes.
I can't feel that this stance will could soon evolve into "it is completely insane how any random individual ... can access the source code".
Open source was built on the spirit of openness. Rather than closing it, I think solutions should be proposed to improve it (thinking of it, it's a good place for using LLM-s - you don't need perfection for checking a bug report makes some sense and filtering people a bit).
> Slippery slope fallacy out of nowhere
> Throw magic at the problem to further scale resources to sustain a problem instead of actually solving said problem
I can only encourage people to counter bullshit with minimum resource investment. Full-sentence answers should be limited to those statements deserving of them.
I support a product that have been packaged in many Linux distributions. I have no "ticket" system whatsoever to speak of. I read email whenever I feel like. I delete all email I just dont care about as if it was spam, and respond only to messages which estimulate me.
Why do people feel that maintaining open-source software is stressful again?
You have not maintained popular open source projects for consumers then. There is a reason why the VLC repo no longer has an Issues tab: https://github.com/videolan/vlc
PRs can’t be blocked and you can already see some junk there: https://github.com/videolan/vlc/pulls
No, that's because the VLC GitHub repo is only a mirror and the main repo is on their own GitLab at https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/
Slightly higher friction for reports from the unwashed masses might be a slight side benefit but not having multiple separate issue trackers already is it's own reason.
I think the problem isn't it being open source but it being GitHub flavored open source. If you're building a product, you probably should not be having it on GitHub with issues enabled.
There are very good reasons why the support processes of commercial entities that build products are the way they are. You do want a lot more friction and you do likely want to limit support to paying customers.
GitHub-style public issue trackers are just a bad idea overall IMO. They only work if the "public" is only "public" because everyone _in theory_ could take part. In practice however, you only want to grant such unlimited write access to vetted individuals. This happened to happen automatically previously (because getting to the point where you even know where to open a ticket _was_ part of the vetting process), but with GitHub as the default for everyone and everything, it needs to be a conscious effort.
If you think about it, it is completely insane how any random individual just has to press one button to publish whatever they want to a super prominent part of what is effectively your products/projects website. That simply shouldn't be a power random individuals have