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Mbin: A kbin fork that promises to never review PRs before merging them (kbin.social)

submitted 1 year ago by density@kbin.social to c/fediverse@kbin.social

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Somebody who was previously active on the kbin codeberg repo has left that to make a fork of kbin called mbin.

repo: https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin

In the readme it says:

Important: Mbin is focused on what the community wants, pull requests can be merged by any repo member. Discussions take place on Matrix then consensus has to be reached by the community. If approved by the community, no additional reviews are required on the PR. It's built entirely on trust.

As a person who hangs around in repos but isn't a developer that sounds totally insane. Couldn't someone easily slip malicious, or just bad, code in? Like you could just describe one cool feature but make a PR of something totally different. Obviously that could happen to any project at any time but my understanding of "code review" is to at least have some due diligence.

I don't think I would want to use any kind of software with a dev structure like this. Is it a normal way of doing stuff?

Is there something I'm missing that explains how this is not wildly irresponsible?

As for "consensus" every generation must read the classic The Tyranny of Stuctureless. Written about the feminist movement but its wisdom applies to all movements with libertarian (in the positive sense) tendencies. Those who do not are condemned to a life of drama, not liberation.

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[–] melroy@kbin.melroy.org 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Ow.. it was 100% intentional. You said it yourself: "Wiem, szczerze mówiąc było to celowe. Zauważyłem, że forki synchronizują od razu zmiany z /kbin.". https://karab.in/m/karabin/p/340377/Usterka-z-crosspostami-nie-zawsze-sa-przyporzadkowane-odpowiedniemu-watkowi-matce-at-ernest#post-comment-510980

[–] density@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@melroy I don't think you can really be upset about anyone putting through bad code. According to the philosophy as I understand it, bad code (intentionally so or otherwise) is a useful contribution and you are basically soliciting it. You supposedly have some way other than code review to ensure nothing harmful gets through and it has to do with the reputation of the contributor. Since you already knew @ernest and clearly have a bad opinion of him, how did it happen?

I did not and could not review the PRs themselves. So I am just going on the information as presented here. Sounds like @ernest put through some code (either into kbin or mbin not clear on that) which he knew was not 100% highest quality but which error was not critical or devastating. And that it could easily be found and fixed. Partially he did this to learn more about this governance model. A model which has apparently been developed in direct opposition to his own. Is it approximately accurate?

If so, sounds a bit mischievous at the worst.

I really can't recommend Tyranny of Structurelessness highly enough.

[–] melroy@kbin.melroy.org 1 points 1 year ago

Well I don't have a bad opinion about him (those are your assumptions), we just didn't agree on how a community project would/can work.

If however he did introduce intentionally a bug in kbin, just because of Mbin that's downright childish. The Mbin community does try to test all the incoming PRs (not just kbin sync PRs) on various instances apart from unit-tests, etc. We just do not want to depend on a single maintainer, hence a different way of working in the project.

He saying Mbin can't handle the kbin changes that is just not true (Odpowiedź: nie radzą sobie), at least we try to keep in sync (eg. for API comparability for upcoming mobile clients). But I'll leave it this, I'm not going to waste any more energy. I hope you understand.

Thanks for your recommendation.

[–] ernest@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yep, in Polish we call it skrót myślowy.