I nearly issued a forking threat a few minutes ago. Only the second time I’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’m dealing with doesn’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’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.
Some standards have to be maintained, and this guy is breaching most of them. I told him by email “you have set yourself up for serious public embarrassment, which I will (reluctantly) deliver if you don’t resume behaving like a responsible maintainer.”
I hope he gets the message…because I don’t want to threaten him with a hostile fork, but he’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’s not just failing me but that whole community.
I’ll do what’s necessary…but I hate having to be the heavy. *Grumble.*