Of course you can criticize, but people are continuously demanding things, like "he should have labeled it as a toy project", "he should have given reasons why he didn't accept the patch", etc. And Drew is very right to say: No, he didn't have to do any of that.
You are right that he didn't have to do any of the things people pointed out but that doesn't mean choosing not to do them isn't fair game for criticism and "he should have labeled it as a toy project" and "he should have given reasons why he didn't accept the patch" seem more like fair criticisms than making demands.
> "he should have labeled it as a toy project" and "he should have given reasons why he didn't accept the patch" seem more like fair criticisms than making demands.
Those are demands. The toy project one is relatively low cost, but "he should have given reasons" brings with its lots of effort to do right - and then you get to do it over and over again, because the masses can fling shit at you faster than you can reason about it.
You know, there is a lot of "He isn't required" but I will say there are reasonable expectations that people have when a project gets to a certain level of exposure/downloads/etc. and while someone should not be "cancelled" or tarred and feathered for not accepting a merge request, if your project is a leader in its niche (Rust web frameworks) you should do better.
You publish your code to Github, you're part of a community. You make it open and allow for contributions and see people are using it, you should be clear about your level of give-a-shit.
Both are true. I obviously can't trust that maintainers will do what they SHOULD do via common sense and online civility, so I SHOULD vet them appropriately.
Why do so many people insist on being aloof and unhelpful in communicating to users of their software? What is so hard about offering a modicum of context for what people can expect of you as a maintainer? It's so ideologically rigid and unreasonable.
> You publish your code to Github, you're part of a community.
Maybe. The main issue I see with github is that it's impossible to disable pull requests there. We have that issue in the coreboot project, which uses github as a read-only mirror.
Maybe we should just shut that down to make clear that coreboot is not part of the "GitHub community".
I urge you to stop thinking about how aloof and unhelpful you are permitted to be, and consider how minimally helpful you could be in communicating to users of your projects.
