The Software Maintainer's Pledge
"All entities move and nothing remains still." – Heraclites, quoted by Plato
I won't break your user experience.
- I won't remove features.
- I won't remove features by pretending to "upgrade" them.
- I won't break anything that lives in your muscle memory.
- I won't force you to update your configuration.
I won't break your user experience, even in a nice way.
- I will let the UI tell you what changed at the right time.
- I will let the UI ask you whether you accept new defaults.
- I will give you simple tools to update your configuration.
- I won't lecture you on why the new experience is better.
- I won't force you to read stuff you don't want to read.
If I break your user experience, I won't give lame excuses.
- I won't use semantic versioning as an excuse.
- I won't use software correctness as an excuse.
- I won't lecture users about why they are wrong.
So, who's in?
Inspired by Brian Goetz's talk Stewardship: the Sobering Parts, Rich Hickey's talk Spec-ulation and years of trying to maintain softwares.
Oh, and this is both Valentine's day and "I love Free Software" day.
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