Don't be that guy.

hperrin@lemmy.world to Open Source@lemmy.ml – 1786 points –

When you're talking to an open source dev, just remember that they are literally giving you their time for free, and they are people who don't like to be treated poorly.

Edit: Just to be clear, I don’t mean any ill will toward the guy. He’s frustrated and he’s just taking it out in the wrong venue at the wrong people, but that doesn’t mean he’s a bad person.

Edit 2: The reinstalling he’s talking about is NPM. So just running npm install. It’s because he tried removing the node_modules directory, which is a reasonable thing to do, but it means you need to reinstall the modules with that command.

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Me approaching Foss developer with bug: Pardon me, if you could grace this lowly worm with but a moment of your attention; I with me a bug report, and I believe I have found the section of code responsible. This inadequate being lacks the technical expertise to fix it and would be eternally indebted if you would turn your monumental skills upon its trifling problems. It would please me immensely if my paltry efforts were of some assistance.

This user: SOFTWARE NO WORK FUCK YOU!

And yet, this is the issue that gets a response instead of a silent closed offtopic wontfix.

Even if that was true effectiveness is never acceptable justification for cruelty

Never is a strong word when a collection of people all came together and agreed that Windows 10 should force updates.

You’ve clearly never worked with any psychopaths or narcissists. Often, pointed (though importantly, carefully offline and undocumented) cruelty is one of the only ways to effectively punch back and make people like that stop trying to fuck with you, because many people like that only really respond to threat dynamics. It’s not terribly common, and it’s not fun to do, but it definitely is warranted once in a blue moon.

Or even worse:

Thanks. Send a complete log of every software on your system, two videos of the bugs in action, and a detailed analysis of what you've had for breakfast.

It is, until it isn’t. I’ve seen devs delete or abandon their projects because of too mush abuse. Nobody likes being yelled at. (Unless that’s your kink. I won’t judge.)

😆 this is legitimately a work of art

The self entitlement in open-source these days never fails to astound me.

As a maintainer of open-source projects, I can confirm... It's unforunate lol

Nowhere else do people get so much for free and yet be so entitled. It's rough.

And here I am anxious thinking I might offend the devs so I spend way too much time thinking what I've written is not rude

I've only had beef with a single dev ever. The maintainer of Prometheus, Brian Brazil, or whatever his name is. His attitude is so shitty towards people proposing actually good ideas that would push his product forward.

Yeah, I had the same experience with the devs of Pushbullet, after constructively suggesting a few ways they might be able to work with proxy servers, and all I got back was "Proxies are bad, mmmmk?".

Fucken Peter Pan-level mentality.

Proxies aren’t bad they are just dated.

Ironically the big problem with proxies is really that software doesn’t support them properly, usually due to lazy or unknowing devs.

It depends on if the first guy is complaining about having to reinstall this specific software, or if the software borked his entire system to the point that he has to reinstall his entire OS. Because that happened to me once. But in the first scenario he is being a dick, and in the second one not so much.

In this case, in trying to resolve the issue, he deleted his node_modules directory. So he’s talking about having to reinstall everything by typing npm install and waiting for it to finish.

oh man..

People can be such dicks, you have my sympathy.

I’ve been thinking about open sourcing a Node project of mine recently.. concerning that this is the kind of thing to expect

Well, this isn’t usual. This is actually really rare. Almost all of the interactions I have with users of my libraries are great. People are generally appreciative and kind, or at least not rude. This is an outlier, and I try not to let these things sour my experience.

He’s frustrated and he’s being abrasive because of that, but that doesn’t make him a bad person. I try to respond without being rude back, but just stern. Usually when you do that, people will either not respond again or apologize. I’ve never had a user keep being rude, and if I did, I would just ban them.

Sometimes people just kinda forget that on the internet they’re still talking to other real people, you know?

You're lucky. I left FOSS dev because I got tired of my free time being abused by people like the one in your post

I've had to adopt a two strikes policy towards these aggressive trolls, who treat you like your their personal servant, especially since they make up like <1% of ppl on issue trackers. After a warning, if they don't play nice, then they're out.

It's the only way to keep the coding experience enjoyable, and not suffer from burnout.

Wait till they realize that's literally the solution to a lot of Node related issues. It's in its own folder for a reason.

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I disagree, in neither scenario the open source dev owes him anything. You get to use and modify the software for free, but the flip side is you are entitled to nothing.

You are entitled to the truth. If the dev knows their software could have very damaging effects then that should be front and center on the software page.

Usually it is? But ultimately it's still your own responsibility. You did not pay the dev, the dev does not ask you to pay them, ergo the dev owes you diddly squad.

Let's be decent with each other, I don't think my expectations are outrageous. I consider decent to make sure that the person that will use your software is aware of the dangers. And the best person to know those dangers is usually the dev.

You're not entitled to a working computer once you execute a free program?

Honestly, no. It's your job to vet the software you run. If it's open source, you had every chance to make sure it wasn't going to irreversibly break your system ahead of time.

Alternatively, you could pay money for a solution from a reputable company with support.

You're implying that to even install the simplest of programs, I'd need to read and understannd many thousands of lines of code, starting with the FOSS project itself and then spidering out to every dependency. This speaks nothing of the fact that it may be written in multiple languages, some of which I am not familiar with, and even if I am, code can be written in ways that's almost impossible to understand. This might take a week for a 200 line project.

Reminds me of when my employer said they were going to stop using open source software until a team had vetted it completely. Lol, once they talked to engineers that idea died immediately.

This. I swear, some people in the FOSS community seem to be convinced everyone who uses a computer is a developer.

Right? And it seems like no one is interested in understanding my point, most only seem interested in defending developers of FOSS. I understand there is no legal obligation from FOSS devs... That is irrelevant.

I love FOSS. It's one of the best products of humanity. I am not attacking devs at all...

My point was only that while devs don't owe anyone anything legally, if the rare edge case happens where their code is destructive by accident, it would be a dick move to ignore complaints about it. I guess because it didn't spell it all out like this, I "deserved" all the downvotes (on since-deleted comments) and condescending remarks?

Yes I know that if I use Firefox I can't sue them if somehow they wipe my OS. Yes I know that would probably never happen, it's extremely unlikely to happen. But if it did, FF owes us at least a response. And I means owes in the sense that it's the right thing to do, not "if you don't do it I can sue you".

That's absolutely a ridiculous stance. Yes, you can personally go through everything, but there's also searching around to find out what other people say about it, actually look through the issues people have raised. Some of it applies to proprietary software as well, find out what other people say about the software. You don't need to do everything yourself, but you do have to take responsibility for trying to make sure it will work as you hope it will.

I can see how you got there, but I'm actually not saying you need to understand any programming languages at all. If the code is out there, and the product is worthwhile, the community can and will vet it.

Like I responded to the other guy, you put a level of trust in anything you use. You can pay for a product and expect polish and support, or you can go the open source route, the DIY hobbyist route, and expect to have to do more yourself. You might have to do research on a product before you trust it. This isn't a radical concept to me. If I was putting together an RC car, I would do research on the motor to make sure it was unlikely to fail catastrophically.

Who put the gun to your head and made you run the software though?

The response to this here is absolutely wild. I guess I should expect my machine to get wiped any moment

Whenever you choose to run a program that has full access to parts of your PC that may cause issues, you are the person who chose to do so.

Just run apps in a sandbox if you don't want to risk having to reinstall your OS in a worst case scenario.

The developer owes you nothing.

Legal obligations that I grasped at age 9 don't really interest me to talk about. It's pretty obvious I understand them. What I was trying to talk about was what reasonable people should do. But apparently that's offensive to many ITT as most responses are condescending af

We might be condescending due to braindead users like this:

You're not entitled to a working computer once you execute a free program?

Despite grasping legal obligations at the age of 9, taking responsibility for your own actions seems to still be a struggle. Good luck.

You're right to an extent, but there is nuance. No end user goes through the Debian repositories and checking the source code for each package by hand. You would be well within your rights to be annoyed if a rm -rf / got added into a script in the repos somehow. A level of trust somewhere is unavoidable for things to work smoothly.

Of course the difference in level of responsibility between core repos and random code pulled of github is vast.

The extent to which you're attempting to sound intelligent would be saddening if you weren't being so rude. I won't be replying to you in the future.

Alternatively, you could pay money for a solution from a reputable company with support.

and run the possibly even greater risk that it'll fuck something up, since you probably can't even look at their source

??? You quoted my comment with 'reputable' in it. You put a level of trust in anything you use. Reputable companies are unlikely to fuck your shit up with bad software. It happens - not trying to say it doesn't - but again, you have to trust somewhere.

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The software is almost certainly provided as is, with risks assumed by the person installing it.

Still, I doubt any dev wants a catastrophic outcome and takes steps to avoid that or warn the end user if the code is more likely to bork something.

I don't think it's unreasonable to expect the dev to do their best but it's also not like you can sue them and win, most likely.

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I guess you are not entitled free support once you execute a free program

I can't say I've spoken directly to a dev in a situation like that, thankfully, but if that opinion were dominant, FOSS wouldn't be a thing. Destroying your data or OS is kind of a no-no, whether you pay for the software or not. Obviously, you can't sue the FOSS dev, but come on, it'd be amazingly shitty if they didn't even try to help if there's any evidence it's their fault.

Do most open source projects damage your computer? It’s obvious they put effort into making usable programs.

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No. It's provided without warranty nor guarantee that it'll work or even leave your system intact. That's the core of most opensource licenses. Dev owes nobody nothing.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

I didn't say anyone owed anyone anything. I was saying one level of frustration was understandable, one was not. Anyhow, my case happened twenty years ago when creative commons barely existed.

Then you're right. The frustration would be understandable, the expression thereof towards the developer, not.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

what's with the link in every comment? just curious

It's a non-commercial copyleft licence for the comment in case the case against Microsoft's CoPilot is won.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

I don't quite understand, why would Microsoft sue you for a lemmy comment?

Just to be sure, is this a serious question or a troll?

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

serious question... not everyone on Lemmy is a computer expert, lol

🙂 my bad

No, not sue me for lemmy comments. AI is trained with lots of data. The world wide web is full of publicly accessible data like our comments. However, not all publicly accessible data may be used without a license. Examples thereof are news paper articles, videos, still pictures, etc. Normally, if you want to use those commercially, consent has to be given by the license holder and a in some cases a fee has to be paid.

Microsoft Copilot is an AI model to help people write code. However, it was trained mostly on opensource code (code made publicly available) which was very often licensed. And it is done so in such a manner that commercial use is allowed with the obligation to make that commercial code publicly available too. Microsoft does not make the code for Copilot publicly accessible and uses code licensed in many, many other ways - and it does so without asking for consent.

This is often a double standard as companies that hide their code fight very hard to keep it secret and/or pursue those in court who do not get a license to use it. However, they will happily use licensed consent to their benefit without consent nor potential payment.

With some clever tricks, AIs have been duped into revealing their training data (often licensed, sometimes very private e.g addresses, birthday, health information, etc.). Lawsuits have ensued (against the AI owners like Microsoft) and are currently active with a pending verdict. Until the verdicts come, I add the license link to my comments. Who knows, maybe it will have an impact, maybe not.

Hopefully I could explain the situation in an understandable manner for you.

Have a good day.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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YOU 👏 ARE 👏 NOT 👏 OWED 👏 CUSTOMER 👏 SERVICE 👏 FOR 👏 USING 👏 THIS 👏 SOFTWARE 👏

YOU 👏 ARE 👏 NOT 👏 OWED 👏 A 👏 WARRANTY 👏

Don't like it? Pay for your software :)

I agree, BUT, you should pay anyways. FOSS developers should be paid

Show me your winrar license!

I sometimes feel like I am the only one with that file. Yes sir, I sometimes feel sad when a good piece of software doesn't have a donation button or license to buy. Even if it does nothing.

Ditched Windows long ago though.

Now flathub has a built-in donate button (for some software)!

It would be great if it is implemented in gnome software too, so I don't need to search on flathub to donate to developers.

Yes sir, I sometimes feel sad when a good piece of software doesn’t have a donation button or license to buy

Yep, I feel that too. There is too much gratis software that's actually good and I want to pay for but many FOSS developers are scared to ask for money for some reason

I only used winrar when I was a kid. I've been using linux (and macos) for most of my life and before that I used 7zip for my zipping needs, so no winrar license for me.

Don’t like it? Pay for your software :)

Most people happily will. So the year of the Linux desktop will always be n+1

The nightmare just crawls out to our reality when paid software is less developed on and more buggy than free Open Source software.

That’s because the people making it are doing it for a job rather than for the love of it. (Except me. Surely I don’t do that.)

Did you know that "payed" is a naval term. See Grammarly on Payed for more information

Haha whoops. Thanks

The funny thing is that since it's an actual word the spell checker might not be of any use to see that it might not be the word you're actually wanting to use. And with the amount of people using "payed" instead of "paid" the dictionaries will probably include "payed" as an alternative way to conjugate "to pay" in the currency sense.

Uh. The spell checker doesnt work on my phone either way. I got lazy to fix anything on my GrapheneOS

User: "I have to waste my whole life fixing this" Dev: "you are complaining that you have to spend a few minutes"

Savage.

You are wasting my time! I demand a refund, where is open source's manager!?

This is also any and all Firefox support queries in a nutshell.

"OMG THIS BROWSER IS SO SHIT IT ALWAYS BREAKS OR GETS SLOW"... "No I have not changed anything in ˋabout:configˋ, and what I did is definitely not the source of the problem!"... "Yes with a reset config it works fine, I don't know why, your browser is shit!"

And it's always the same people who do "hardening" and "privacy enhancement", having fuck all actual clue what they're doing but thinking they're oh so smart. 😑

I see this in the comments section of Skyrim mods and it pisses me off so much

Worse, I see this with Fediverse platforms like Lemmy. During the initial Reddit influx so many people expected the exact level of polish and user experience as Reddit and there were tons of threads (on Lemmy itself) basically complaining how much Lemmy "sucks" compared to Reddit, despite them coming over to Lemmy because Reddit was being enshitified. Same with Mastodon when the Twitter people were coming over.

I mean to be fair it's still terrible. Better than the early days and in my opinion better than using Reddit which is why I'm here. But basic functionality is just awful. Trying to discover new content outside of your particular instances incredibly tedious. So many large instances won't stop trigger happy Banning practically every other goddamn instance out there which isn't helping. The whole thing that originally made Reddit popular was that it was an easy place to go to find almost any topic of Interest but I now have to hunt through many different instances to potentially find what I'm looking for on top of that the community for any one particular interest could easily be scattered across multiple different instances that don't Federate with each other and if I subscribe to all of them I'm going to likely be subjected to a lot of repeating posts

I fully understand why a lot of people were not on board with that I put up with it because I hate Reddit more than I hate that but a lot of people will not share that opinion

Keep in mind though that Lemmy is very much still in open beta while Reddit has been a mature product for years now. Lemmy only started federating like two years ago, and even compared to other Fediverse platforms Lemmy is still very new. Most of the "must have" features people associate with Reddit took a while to materialize as well, in fact when Reddit launched it didn't have subreddits or even nested comments on posts. Not saying your grievances are invalid, but give it time and things will improve as Lemmy gets more development.

IIRC it always had threaded comments but yes subreddits took years. Shamefully I was very much in the anti subreddit camp and argued fiercely for tags instead like Flickr (RIP)

Lemmy with Sync is pretty baller though not sure what everyone is complaining about.

It's every game and the bigger the community the lower the denominator.

Couldn't agree more.

For what it's worth I think Brett Cannon wrote one of the best posts ever on the social contract of open source and how Not To Be That Guy :)

https://snarky.ca/the-social-contract-of-open-source/

Should be required reading IMO for anyone ever on Github :P

just spent a few mins reading it, definitly agree with you, required for any issue reporter

Hehe, sometimes I wish that I could be snarky like that. ;) Good for you.

I have been told by numerous people these days that there are no free things in life. I write and contribute to FOSS software, and had that exact discussion.

Apparently, I do it to feel good, and for the prestige, a reward in itself. Also, I probably want to make up for something.

"Doing something for free is no excuse to do it badly."

Some others don't even know what "free" means." And some don't believe it at all, that someone is paying me. Probably thinking about influencers or something. Perhaps they saw an ad somewhere and believed I'd see any of that revenue. ;)

I just went with posting the wiki entry about FOSS, and my ko-fi page, and thanked them for their interest. The first two, because they genuinely didn't know any better, and the third because, well, at least that one is clear. Every user is a tester. Testing is good.

When you have blocked most of the troll instances and have no idea what’s going on in these comments

How do you know that someone is on a blocked instance?

If you look at the number of comments Lemmy says there are, versus the number of comments visible, the difference is how many people from blocked instances there are.

I've seen one post where it said there were 51 comments, but none would appear for me. That's because all of the comments were from instances blocked or defederated by my instance.

Would it be OK if I will be that guy when ranting about NVIDIA Linux drives? Asking for a friend 😉

Oh yeah fuck NVIDIA. All my homies hate NVIDIA.

All mine hate capitalism. Though, I think we're saying the same thing. ;)

I don’t mean any ill will toward the guy. He’s frustrated and he’s just taking it out in the wrong venue at the wrong people, but that doesn’t mean he’s a bad person.

But he is a bad person. He's being a fucking idiot and being insulting to the person who made the software for him in the first place.

People like that don't deserve patience and understanding. Perhaps a good response would be "this software is free for you to use, if you don't like it then fuck off and make your own".

Everyone without exception has had moments of weakness where they lashed out at something or someone wrongfully. That's a bad deed but that can't be the definition of a bad person.

Especially in this context. The dude isn't really attacking the dev directly. He actually might just be venting. I wouldn't do that like that but you really can't assume anything from such a short exchange.

Exactly. Although you should still not be rude to the Devs if they don't deserve it.

Just reading a mild, reasonable, even keel’d post made my day. I appreciate you!

But he is a bad person.

People like that don't deserve patience and understanding.

These black and white statements won't do you or anyone else any good. We understand that an inconsiderate or rude act doesn't define a person when we can believe that about ourselves and love ourselves despite our many mistakes and cringe-worthy incidents.

When we love ourselves we begin to offer others the same grace and understanding we allow ourselves. We see the myriad reasons we don't think or act how we'd like to and realize that everyone else's life is just as difficult and confusing, and often for reasons we'll never see or understand.

Being polite is better than not being polite, but the way I see it, all user complaints are valid and are better not taken personally if possible. Maybe you as the developer didn't do anything wrong that contributed to their problem, or are not actually in a position to resolve whatever their problem is, but it's worth keeping in mind the bigger picture: how well peoples computers work to benefit their lives.

If someone is getting upset that they have to spend time troubleshooting, maybe because they didn't understand something or made a mistake, there's definitely other people going through the exact same less-than-ideal experience and not saying anything about it. That's information about the state of how well things are working and it's better for it to be out there in some form than not.

Yeah, I didn’t take it personally. He’s just venting, but doing it toward the person trying to help you is unhelpful. That’s why I posted here, basically saying to remember that you’re talking to a person, not a punching bag.

Nah - don't make excuses for them. Here in Australia, we call entitled people like this cunts. With a hard 'c'. Not the nice one, with a soft 'c'.

Just wanted to say I'm a big fan of SMUI. I admire and appreciate the work you have done with it.

There is always a risk using libraries from others. If you install something without knowing what you are doing and without considering the risks, you should not be installing it.

You are literally sending 99% of the new Linux users back to Windows haha. C' mon its not that hard, look at what custom ROM developers do. They put a big disclaimer warning of the risks of installing the software. You won't find a single user blaming the devs for a bricked phone, and there are lot of them. The one who has to consider the risks and warn about them is the dev, just because (s)he is the one who knows the software better and not all users are developers and they usually don't know what are the risks.

You can install shit in Windows too, it is exactly the same case when grandma installs too many toolbars in Internet Explorer 6. No one is warning you there that you might be installing malware.

What I mean is that there are already curated repositories for each distro that can be accessed easily by the package manager. If you go outside of your package manager and repos, gloves are off, you better know what you are doing.

Regarding custom ROMs, since you brought it up and being a custom ROM enthusiast, there are still a lot of complaints, nastiness and pressure from the users similar to this. Installing a ROM has definitely a higher knowledge barrier and that makes you aware of the risks, also you will brick your phone before you are able to install a ROM... if you don't know what you are doing.

Finally, the developer here in this very lemmy post mentions that the OP of that bug report was working with them in order to solve the issue. The one on the screenshot was just a random dude unnecessarily being rude. Free software is usually delivered as is with no warranties, specifically small projects and libraries.

Thanks for coming to my TED.talk

Are you the developer for SMUI? Small world to see a username I recognized from another site. Nice-looking components! 👍

I am. Thanks! :) I built my email service, http://port87.com with it.

Oh that's an interesting concept, I've been using username+label@gmail in a similar way for years, and missed it when I switched to proton

This goes for inter-developer communication too. Be nice to one another. Someone just wants to help sometimes.

See also: the hard parts of open source.

I just watched this, it was a very good video, experienced a lot of the same things he did/does, thx. Was really interesting learning about the history of some these "alienated loner with god-complex" that was cultivated in early tech. Also good stuff about how the purpose for a given space shapes the discussion and interactions.

A lot of us understand the problem: that silicon-valley, in pursuit of profits and engagement, has wrecked peoples brains with traumatizing ragebait for years, and how stressful it makes all of our lives. We have to do everything we can to make these spaces the opposite: enjoyable, fun, and at the same time not addictive.

Don't worry: I intend to NEVER be that guy. I don't even USE the word 'literally' except ironically, so I think I'm safe.

this sort of stuff is rampant. A few years old but it makes my blood boil every time I think about it.

Tool Creator should work on this, it ain't making no sense that the default json file (Google) is not updated cause seeing that work on Google tells us that it definitely works on all sites

@drk1wi please resolve google.json file to stop this cookie disabled error

Seems minor but the tone of the demand is wildly entitled.

Or don't be that "don't use any of my GPLv3 packages in your projects, because i don't want"

Or, that guy who is "My project is free and open source, please don't use for piracy, i don't support piracy"

But yeah, complaining sucks, especially from somebody who doesn't have his hands dirty, to somebody who does

And for free projects, don't pay- don't expect anything And even when paying, don't expect much Just make stuff yourself, only making everything yourself you can be sure it will be good

Open source developers: Why aren't more people using open source software software for everything. It's better.

Also open source developers: Oh it broke your computer, well that's your problem. You should have had a software engineering degree in order to vet the software yourself.

User goes back to closed source paid spyware.. ahem software.

Open source developers: Why aren't more people using open source software software for everything. It's better.

There's a difference between trying to find out what is wrong and being a cunt.

If this person had asked politely after quickly searching for answers, the developer's response would most likely be different and helpful

Absolutely. Should have clarifying that I'm not defending the attitude and abuse of developers. However driving non technical end users to insanity with ill thought through processes is also wrong. Such as expecting users to write bug reports when an automated tool should be being used. An unclear installation guide where 90% of user run into the same problem. etc.

Linus's (LTT) Linux challenge was the ultimate test of the open source community and they failed miserably. Blaming linus for bricking the system. Um hello, he never should have been incentivized to open the command line at all.

There is a tradeoff between UX, user liberty, and user privacy. Traditionally, Linux is leaning heavily towards liberty. However now there are systems have locked down core system (like chrome os or mac os), so it is impossible to mess things up. Yet user might complain that they "cannot do anything".

As for telemetry, privacy is a fundamental pillar of human right. I admire FOSS communities' stance on privacy by default, and I don't think they should change that. Although now opt-in privacy preserving telemetry is slowly getting implemented in Linux, I think it is a good thing, but needs still be treated carefully. Privacy-preserving telemetry is good, but it is notoriously hard to guarantee such correctness.

Finally, I think the bug Linus encountered is extremely rare. The flatpak install script is broken, and the apt install removes DE. I don't think there are any documented incident of both installation methods to have such critical failure. It is even more unfortunate that it happens just as the most popular tech youtuber decides to try Linux.

It didn’t break his computer. In trying to fix it, he deleted his node_modules directory, and now he’s complaining that he has to run npm install and wait for it to finish.

So to be clear, it was his own action that caused him to have to reinstall everything.

The entitlement of the open source community can be astonishingly deaf. You tell users that open source is better, users try it and your response is, oh it's free software, you get what you pay for.

Pay who? If I donate do I get paid support? Almost any other paid product/service based off that project almost certainly won't be open source and probably subscription spyware. So your answer to use open source is don't use open source???

If this is your attitude on your repo then don't imply/demonstrate it as for production ready use. It a personal fun dev project not fit for mainstream use. Pick a side, you can't have both.

I actually offer consulting services for this library in particular, so yes, if you pay, you get paid support.

Don’t be that second guy, use Nix.

I agree with OP, but the whole confrontation could’ve been avoided in the first place if all dependencies were spelled out to the letter in the form of a flake.nix with the latest accompanying flake.lock file.

I swear Nix users are the mormons of the Linux world.

Yes, but one of our promises is real... Just a real pain in the ass sometimes.

Are you saying that I will get my own planet if I use Nix?

It’s a frontend JavaScript UI library. I can’t control what other dependencies people install alongside my library, or even whether they follow my library’s dependency list.

Isn't package.json for controlling what dependency versions people install with?

I think I'm missing something.

Yes, and I have a package.json that lists dependencies and the versions I test with. You can force a different version though. I don’t think that’s what happened here. I’m guessing it’s a version of some dependency that should work, because it was released as a minor version within the range I specified, but doesn’t actually work.

It could also be an issue with the build system/bundler, which I can’t really control either.

Yeah JavaScript is a horrible language and ecosystem in a lot of ways, but package.json and friends don't really give me much trouble.

And even if you hose something, you should be able to clear it out and reinstall easily.

I'm assuming the maintainer didn't (knowingly) make a breaking change in a minor/patch release. That's a high crime.

It's way worse on C and it's family. I still have nightmares with undocumented embedded dependencies that are so intertwined with the codebase that make JS look like a godsend.

Upvoted in Nix solidarity. One day they'll understand.

I think it’s funny. We are the new “I use Arch, BTW” and I’m happy to embrace it.

I just hate having to re-configure all my stuff whenever I set up a new box 🤷

Agreed. That and I hate Docker with a burning passion.

As someone who is out of the loop a lot, what is it about Docker that you hate? What do you use instead?

It took me weeks to wrap my head around it, but now I enjoy being able to spin something up without too much work. At work we have the whole CICD thing with Docker and K8, but I am pretty far removed from what they have to do in the run files.

What other kinds of workflows do people use these days?

Nix flakes are all I need to completely replace Docker.

Don't be the guy who ignores reports that your software doesn't work with new dependency versions just because you can't be arsed to test with anything else even if the report looks like a legitimate problem.

If you're not paying somebody, don't expect anything. You want shit done on your time, then cough up some compensation.

I have been testing with the original reporter of the problem. This guy came in, said he had the same problem, then cursed at me.

That was less directed at you and more at the idea that just pinning versions solves the issue which is unfortunately very frequent among proponents of things like vendoring, nix, Docker containers and similar tools that allow a project to stay on an old version for potentially years. Sorry if that came across that way.