> People started to open PR to tell me I was wrong and I should open the issues.

Did those pull requests have code changes?

I don't know Francisco but I'm sure he deserves better than this

https://github.com/franciscop/picnic/pull/203/files

+If you spot a bug or any other issue you may go to hell because this software is officially Bug Free(TM). +

If you see somebody behaving like that, report them to GitHub so they don't do it to anybody else. The link is on their user profile page.

I did, no response so far.

No

I think that's the point. Maintainers have no obligation to do anything for anyone

No, there is no obligation. But there’s a thing called courtesy. And as humans there are certain social norms.

If someone spams me, I will ignore or retaliate by reporting as spam. If someone sends a low effort question, I might politely tell them to rtfm. If someone makes an effort to articulate a problem, even if I disagree, I’ll try to give them a reasoned response.

And if I genuinely have no interest in any interaction I’ll make sure to disable issues/comments or otherwise communicate this intent.

So you agree that there is no obligation, then assert a set of social obligations that should be respected.

Do you see the contradiction here?

You are simply being pedantic.

He said there's no "absolute" obligation, but there are some by virtue of us living in a society.

I’m not saying this to be pedantic. And I’m not denying that there is some social expectations when living in society.

If you say that there is no obligations, but also that you should follow some social expectations, then you’re contradicting yourself. It’s just a nicer way to say that people should behave according to what you consider to be acceptable.

Btw, which society rules do you mean? Because you have a lot of differences in different places regarding politeness and other social obligations.

Ok, so the problem here is that “obligation” has two meanings, and they’re being conflated here. One is pretty close to “being courteous to others” and the other is “you must do this”. When people say “maintainers have no obligation to anyone”, the point to the license where it usually says something like “THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED AS-IS WITH NO WARRANTY” and you can tell that it’s the legal “must” definition because it’s in all caps and written in a way that nobody actually would write. So that means that nobody can sue the maintainer when they don’t do something or the other. All good, right? Well, now the question being posed above is “does this mean that the maintainer can also be rid of their obligations in the sense of courtesy, not legality?” And now since there is a difference in the definitions it is not contradictory to want to say “yes” to the second question. And yes, you are correct to say that these differ based on circumstances and location: that’s OK, we don’t judge them in a court of law. We do, however, judge people for their failings to meet societal obligations, based on our personal judgements.

I don’t think there is a conflation before your own comment. There is no reason to discuss legal obligations because that part is covered by licenses.

The entire discussion is at the level of social expectations.

> There is no reason to discuss legal obligations because that part is covered by licenses.

Correct, I think we agree on that.

> The entire discussion is at the level of social expectations.

No, this statement:

> No, there is no obligation. But there’s a thing called courtesy.

Is actually “No, there is no legal obligation. But there’s a thing called courtesy.“ And here the contradiction falls away and the discussion turns to whether there is a social expectation to be courteous. On that point my (and the above commenter, I suspect) would say that yes, of course there is an expectation of social courtesy. There’s one in every other setting too, so why not here?

You are not "gingerlime" who said that, I understand the original as "moral/social obligation" and not "legal obligation" but you seem to be putting the word "legal" on the users' mouth by saying what they "actually" mean?

As a Spaniard living in Japan, what social rules should I use to apply my social courtesy on Github?

I am gingerlime. I simply meant obligation as MUST and social norms / courtesy as SHOULD. So I guess technically you’re correct that it’s not a legal obligation, but I think the GP’s point is valid.

> No, there is no obligation. But there’s a thing called courtesy. And as humans there are certain social norms.

In my experience, there are no objective social norms or definition of "courtesy". What's polite in one culture might not be in another. Projecting your own values onto others isn't helpful.

Most cultures share some general social norms, such as courtesy to others. I would say it’s actually more unhelpful to dismiss norms entirely just because they have variance.

I think they mean they disabled issues altogether on the two github projects. I would give the benefit of doubt and assume they went through and responded to all open issues beforehand. Maybe even put things in a "known issues" section of the readme.

> Of course some people are low effort issuers, but some people put time and effort into opening an issue on a project. When the maintainer closes it without even taking 60 seconds to type a quick message why, it shows me that the maintainer is the entitled dick, not the user.

So what you're saying is that if a person puts a lot of time and effort into opening an issue, they're entitled to a response?

The maintainer has to justify themselves to noone, and only the maintainer knows their aims, contexts and ambitions for the project. That long, detailed issue that someone submits could have been the 50th one they saw that week about the same thing, which they'd already decided they won't fix.

I recently opened a couple of PRs on a small project, one of which looks like it'll be rejected and the other hasn't visibly been reviewed. This is fine. If I need these things badly enough or soon enough, I'll fork the project - I'm certainly not entitled to anyone giving up their time reviewing my code or agreeing with me.

When I see someone expects/demands something of me, I point them to the permissive MIT license. I am also a Spaniard living in Japan, so the concept of "social norms/expectations/etc" (whatever that even is) is totally meaningless to me.

If you put some effort and need help with the project, I'll try my best to help you. If you come demanding free support for your project, I'll just close the issue saying this is not the place.

It sounds like you and I are in agreement then. This is the same way I manage my projects as well. I think this is the best way to handle it. It gives respect to others without accepting disrespect from them.

> I make a point to fix typos and such in documentation when I find them

This is amazing, thank you so much. Typos are very troublesome and they slip through the cracks too easily. A typo PR or issue will get merged 100% of the times in my case.

I meant that I closed the issue section, not individual issues. For individual issues I don't recall closing a single non-rude one without at least a short explanation.

Sorry I mean I closed the issue section

I think that's understandable. You closed issues for bugs you didn't resolve.

Maybe you know the OP, but in my experience a lot of issues are not bug reports but very low quality, uninformed or unreasonable requests or questions. Like questions made about basic functionality that is answered in the documentation/faq, or requests for features that are completely outside the scope of the project. Another popular category is requests for basic education e.g. “how does DQN work?”. That’s fine if it’s one person but when it’s 100 it gets overwhelming.

Exactly this. Bug reports were very welcome! While I stated that the API would not expand any longer in some projects, I also considered coherent feature requests a positive, and normally suggested and guided those as a plugin that lives within their codebase.

The problem was when people came like "I am using this library, can you debug my code?" and pasted a 500-liner, or like "this doesn't work on my XYZ system, fix it", or when they were just rude or demanding.

I've met some wonderful people BTW, and would also not trade that for anything.

Sure. On the other hand, sometimes people put a lot of time and effort into isolating an issue and writing up the best description they can manage. Closing the issue is a one-click FU to the people who are doing their best to help.

Some users are overly entitled, but some maintainers are self-absorbed douchebags. I've seen both sides.

I will never understand this point of view. The author has already given you possibly hundreds of hours of free labor simply by publishing the project. But now, because they won’t give you a few more, they’re a douchebag?

Even if they close all issues with no comment, they have given you a such _massive_ head start vs having to write the entire project yourself from scratch. How can you be anything but grateful?

It's just that if you put lot of effort into isolating a bug for someone for free, it can feels bad to have it rejected without explanation.

Also if it's a real issue that you won't fix you should at least leave the issue open so other people know.

IMO you can definitely be extremely grateful for someone's contribution and also think they are sort of rude, not incompatible views/feeling.

> ...isolating a bug for someone...

I think you mistakenly switched the roles there. You are not isolating a bug for the author. The author is using their software and is happy with its current state. It is you that is being hit by a supposed bug, and you are isolating it for yourself. Then you are expecting the author to do the additional work for you and handle your supposed fixes. Don’t get me wrong, you’re probably both helping each other in the best spirit of open source, but it’s not you who’s the ideal of generosity there.

This a thousand times. If you hit a bug on my code and put together a PR to fix it, the reasons I would merge it are in order of importance:

1. For you, since you are nice and helpful debugging it and fixing it for you and others so I want to make it easy for you to use the working code.

2. For other users that might hit the bug, for every PR bugfix there are likely N people hitting the bug.

3. For me in case I hit it in the future.

4. For correctness sake.

But not all bugs are straightforward, many have side-effects or disadvantages that I might not be comfortable merging straight away. So I have to evaluate how long it'll take me to review the PR and whether it's even worth-it (the vast majority of times PRs are worth-it, but issues are a hit and miss).

> It's just that if you put lot of effort into isolating a bug for someone for free, it can feels bad to have it rejected without explanation.

Where does that bad feeling come from? Does it come from the fact that you feel like you're owed a response? Do you get the same feeling when you email strangers and they don't respond?

> Also if it's a real issue that you won't fix you should at least leave the issue open so other people know.

> IMO you can definitely be extremely grateful for someone's contribution and also think they are sort of rude, not incompatible views/feeling.

You're not entitled to gratitude. Assuming that people should & will run their own projects according to your values around courtesy is a little self-centred.

If you need the bug fixing and the maintainer isn't doing it fast enough, just fork it. This is the point of open source.

> Where does that bad feeling come from? Does it come from the fact that you feel like you're owed a response? Do you get the same feeling when you email strangers and they don't respond?

It's just the time spent for me, I mean if for some reason I put like an hour of my time composing an email to a stranger and they didn't respond I would unhappy. It would be my fault but I would still be unhappy.

I agree that no one is entitled to have everyone act nice to them. I just think it's nice to tell someone why you're closing their issue.

> If you need the bug fixing and the maintainer isn't doing it fast enough, just fork it. This is the point of open source.

100%

I can understand this. I think once I realised that there was significant value to me in putting the bug report together in the first place, I felt happier if it just got closed or ignored.

There's something about putting time and effort into writhing a good bug report that forces you to truly try and understand what's happening.

I've given thousands of hours on my open source, but just because it's the way I code. Any personal project where I create a small self-contained abstract unit, I'll put that as open source. Most of this code (by, say lines) is provided "as-is" with no much expectations. Those where I think they solve a real gap in the ecosystem I'll put more effort into writing good documentation.

If they have it open for issues and then handle the responses they have invited poorly, then yes, that's rude. A douchebag doesn't magically stop being a douchebag because they've open-sourced some code.

fair, I actually didn’t know you could disable issues.

Alas you /still/ can’t disable pull requests, even when a Github mirror is completely the wrong place to submit patches.

I've done this after scouring the documentation and being unable to find an answer. When there isn't a newsgroup or email list setup it's often really the only way to get in touch with a developer or maintainer. Suboptimal for sure, but if a library seems like it may solve your problem, it's worth a shot.

OP does not owe you their labor.

That's a pretty aggressive comment. Let's try to be civil.

What's aggressive/uncivil about that?

Sorry I mean I closed the issues section