{"id":4669,"date":"2012-10-21T06:41:36","date_gmt":"2012-10-21T10:41:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=4669"},"modified":"2014-03-10T05:00:10","modified_gmt":"2014-03-10T09:00:10","slug":"i-hate-having-to-be-the-heavy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=4669","title":{"rendered":"I hate having to be the heavy&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I nearly issued a forking threat a few minutes ago.  Only the second time I&#8217;ve felt a need to do that and the first was in 1993, so this is not something I do casually. And I drew back from the brink.<\/p>\n<p>But I may have to if the maintainer I&#8217;m dealing with doesn&#8217;t clean up his act.  His library is critical to one of my projects, but his behavior has been increasingly sloppy and erratic lately.  He made a serious design mistake which he&#8217;s been trying to paper over with kluges; the kluges have made the code unstable and the latest shipped version is actually broken to the point of unusability without a patch.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Some standards have to be maintained,  and this guy is breaching most of them.  I told him by email &#8220;you have set yourself up for serious public embarrassment, which I will (reluctantly) deliver if you don&#8217;t resume behaving like a responsible maintainer.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>I hope he gets the message&#8230;because I don&#8217;t <em>want<\/em> to threaten him with a hostile fork, but he&#8217;s backing me into a position where I think it may be my duty to aim that nuke at him.  His library has other users, after all; he&#8217;s not just failing me but that whole community.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll do what&#8217;s necessary&#8230;but I hate having to be the heavy.  *Grumble.*<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I nearly issued a forking threat a few minutes ago. Only the second time I&#8217;ve felt a need to do that and the first was in 1993, so this is not something I do casually. And I drew back from the brink. But I may have to if the maintainer I&#8217;m dealing with doesn&#8217;t clean&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=4669\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">I hate having to be the heavy&#8230;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,13],"tags":[24],"class_list":["post-4669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hacker-culture","category-software","tag-open-source","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4669"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4669\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5348,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4669\/revisions\/5348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}