I hate having to be the heavy&#8230;
<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>
<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>
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<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>
<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>
<p>I&#8217;ll do what&#8217;s necessary&#8230;but I hate having to be the heavy.  *Grumble.*</p>
