alt Hacker NewsThis idea of "here's the beta, I'll release the code in a few weeks" sounds counter intuitive to me. is it normal in open source? Any reason for it?
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That model of development is what led to Eric Raymond’s seminal The Cathedral and the Bazaar essay.
“Cathedral” refers to development behind closed doors, where you just get a release and a source dump to go with it.
“Bazaar” refers to development done in the open, where you have constant access to the bleeding edge.
At the time of the essay, GCC and Emacs were ESR’s examples of Cathedral-style development, and Linux was the premiere example of the Bazaar style.
The Cathedral style has become a lot less common over the years, but it’s still how e.g. SQLite operates, I think? E.g. Google definitely operates like that with AOSP, but that's arguably more a fruit of them being maliciously compliant with their Open Source promises.
Some projects do, for example the Lua programming language does their work in private, between releases.
Other projects do it less successfully, making grandiose claims and later releasing things in a partially working state, for example the V-programming language.
It's not super-common, but just those two examples off the top of my head show it's not entirely unheard of.
Not normal. This a new trend of people who use too much Ai, or maybe more specifically the Claw/Ralph loops where you end up with a few commits touching 1000s of files. For about the last year, many Show HN to github projects are often just a single commit
We need to think more about what we are doing as an industry, instead of letting the machines think for us (imo)
In the past, we've done that because we've tended to do large refactors, many of which we've backed out of. For that reason, we've kept our own internal development version, which is ahead of the public version. Then when whatever we're developing is ready for public use, then we open source it