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Rsync author responds to online outrage about his usage of LLMs (medium.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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Seems like he's been pushed into using LLMs as a way to cope with the deluge of LLM-generated security reports.

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[–] 34 points 4 months ago (28 children)

I think it's unreasonable to complain that the guy is not working enough for free.

I think it's reasonable to alert people that rsync is not being properly maintained anymore and to seek alternatives.

I would prefer the maintainer to announce publicly that he can't maintain the project anymore and is looking for help/someone to take over instead of breaking the project silently.

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  • [–] 17 points 4 months ago (22 children)

    But where will the maintainers for these alternatives come from, when barely anybody has stepped up in the 30 years of rsync's existence? Your comment implies that tridge didn't call for help before, which is far from the truth.

    This is thankless maintenance on critical software, not some *-arr toy project for hobbyist self-hosters.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago* (7 children)

    But where will the maintainers for these alternatives come from, when barely anybody has stepped up in the 30 years of rsync's existence?

    Universal Healthcare would increase the pool of willing developers by an order of magnitude here.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    No disagreement here but I'm not sure that's on the menu right now

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago* (3 children)

    Universal Healthcare would increase the pool of willing developers by an order of magnitude here.

    I'm not so sure. The problem is not a lack of developers. The problem is a lack of developers interested in working on rsync, or on any other specific project you can name. Most developers would rather work on their own projects.

    I would also question whether or not universal healthcare (though unquestionably a good thing) would actually result in such an increase in available developers. The following study looked at the geographical distribution of OSS developers in 2021, via Github contributions, and found that the US had a similar number of OSS developers per capita compared to similar countries that do have universal healthcare (see table 2):

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162522000105

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago* (2 children)

    Github and the whole culture that it came out of it used to (it feels sooooo good to say that in the past tense) be globally hinged on Silicon Valley, why would you not expect to see a anomalously high number of US developers on it?

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    That's definitely a possibility, along with the possibility that countries with worse English language skills might be underrepresented on GitHub, despite having universal healthcare. Conversely, if the US is over-represented on GitHub, then the pool of US developers who are not already active on GitHub may also be depleted compared to other countries. However, that is not something we can read out of the available evidence.

    The most we can conclude is probably that the US getting universal healthcare might result in an increase in available OSS developers, depending on which assumptions turn out to be correct, but suggesting that it would lead to an order of magnitude increase is surely premature

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

    suggesting that it would lead to an order of magnitude increase is surely premature

    The US is continuing to worsen in performance on meaures of small business entrepreneurship in essentially all industries in the US, software and software adjacent industries are no different especially if you don't get distracted by the AI bubble inflating that value of a bunch of illusions claiming to be businesses.

    It is easy to see how the inability of the average person to try a new idea, or risk taking on a project that may not pay off immediately translates directly to a lack of available developers for open source software projects.

    The impact of Universal Healthcare would be huge for open source development in the US, the amount of programmers that would be pushed over the line from "just making ends meet while having a work life balance" to "ok maybe I could devote some time to open source development".

    Don't get me wrong though, I think we need to normalize straight up paying developers for Open Source Development. Just because it is open source doesn't mean it doesn't take labor, that is not the argument I am making.

    https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2018/oct/affordable-care-act-impact-small-business

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago* (13 children)

    https://github.com/rclone/rclone

    https://github.com/restic/restic

    https://github.com/bcpierce00/unison

    https://syncthing.net/

    The thing with old, critical software is that after some time people don't really want to dig through decades of C code and prefer to write something new using modern tools. Those projects get plenty of support because people actually do want to work on them. If no one wants to work on rsync than what the maintainer is doing now is just prolong it's agony a couple of years. I would say he should do the minimum work, announce end of life date and move on. People that need tools like rsync will develop something.

    Also, having critical software depend on one guy is not safe. We should avoid that. If critical software depends on one guy it should be phased out.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago (10 children)

    Also, having critical software depend on one guy is not safe. We should avoid that. If critical software depends on one guy it should be phased out.

    Here are the percent of commits from the top committer in each repository you mentioned, as well as rsync, over the last 3 months:

    • rsync: 99.0%
    • restic: 93.2%
    • rclone: 87.5%
    • union: 82.9%
    • syncthing: 74.4%

    As you can see, each of this projects depends heavily on a single person, though to a lesser degree than rsync. That's just the nature of most open-source software.

    Note that I excluded dependabot commits from the calculations and counted Claude commits as the lead developer for rsync

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (9 children)

    How I imagine this:

    1. rsync gets end of life date
    2. People that rely on rsync start looking for alternatives
    3. They try to switch and figure out what functionality is missing
    4. They contribute to some of the alternative to fill the gaps

    For example, I'm about to setup some syncing for my homelab and I will not use rsync for that. That's why talking about the state of rsync is important. As I said, it's not about attacking the dev for not working hard enough. It's about long term planning.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (8 children)

    I remember when the maintainer for discord.py stepped down. He eventually stepped back in because no one wanted took over the project and he didn't want to see it die. This was before the current AI era, all someone had to do was continue to develop it.

    I think almost everyone will do step 2 and 3 but not step 4.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (7 children)

    The fact that open source exist and functions so well for decades shows that people do step 4. If no one wants to step in it usually means the project is not important.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (6 children)

    I think what you're missing is that the number of people doing step 4 has been going downhill steadily since the 2000s. People start open source projects yes, which for 99% of them don't bring in any users and barely get maintained over the long run, but the pool of people willing to contribute to large established projects is so small it is becoming problematic.

    Even Wikipedia is having its own editor crisis, where most of the power editors are greying out and barely anyone is stepping up to replace them.

    And this is happening exactly because most people, like you, think that the free infrastructure around us is a fait accompli which doesn't require us to personally get involved in their maintenance, and that we can even afford to scare away those that do contribute.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (5 children)

    most people, like you, think that the free infrastructure around us is a fait accompli which doesn’t require us to personally get involved in their maintenance

    I do contribute time and donate money to open source project so... miss?

    With less contributors simply mean we will have to be smarter about which projects we supports. In open source it's a natural process. People support projects they actually use and need. If we can't get enough resources to support even the most basic infrastructure then the experiment will end.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (4 children)

    I do contribute time and donate money to open source project so… miss?

    You're missing the point. Sure you do, that's a nice anecdote, but the data shows most people don't. You are part of a shrinking cohort that is already insufficient to maintain what we need in the long run.

    If we can’t get enough resources to support even the most basic infrastructure then the experiment will end

    And then what ? Only large corporations can finance their own in-house tools and they gain even greater advantage against the rest of society ? What a great outcome...

    Your point of view is not crazy but i think it suffers from too much optimism in the face of bleak data.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

    You’re missing the point. Sure you do, that’s a nice anecdote, but the data shows most people don’t. You are part of a shrinking cohort that is already insufficient to maintain what we need in the long run.

    But you accused me specifically of not contributing. If you're making a broader point don't single me out.

    And then what ? Only large corporations can finance their own in-house tools and they gain even greater advantage against the rest of society ? What a great outcome…

    Yes, that will be the outcome. And it will suck. I'm not optimistic, I'm realistic. If people wills top caring about open source it will die. Throwing AI at the problem may buy us some time but in the end LLMs also require resources and without support from community all the models will be controlled by corporations.

    My sensation is that we're doing fine for now. The community is still big enough for a decade or two. No idea what will happen after that.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    If you’re making a broader point don’t single me out

    Yes that is a communication lapse on my end, i try to make issues personal to emphasize them but it's not always relevant. I don't think it should detract from the broader point, sorry if it does.

    My sensation is that we’re doing fine for now

    I think the data shows that we're far from fine and already resource-constrained on most critical projects. It's not that people stop caring about open source, it is still fundamental to the way the web works. It's just that they don't feel personally compelled to pitch in because they think we're doing fine now. The wikipedia analogy works well here : it is still fundamental to the way people get information, but it's chronically understaffed and may already be in a death spiral.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    Maybe you're right. People have less resources and less spare time. Maybe we are fucked, even in the short-mid term. It looks pretty good to me (a lot of big players rely on Linux and core open source infrastructure, open source/self hosted tools are generally recognized as better for the business, we moved out from proprietary standards to open ones, there's push for interoperability and so on) but maybe there are deeper issues I don't see and it will all collapse sooner than I think.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago

    The trouble with some of those projects (e.g. unison and sun thing) is that they don't solve the same problem, not really.

    A rewrite with modern tooling would be better done if it was incremental.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    Also, having critical software depend on one guy is not safe. We should avoid that. If critical software depends on one guy it should be phased out.

    I'm sorry to say 90% of the internet's load bearing infrastructure is in this situation. It's just how the story goes, everybody wants to build low-stakes toy projects, nobody wants to do high-effort low-reward infrastructure work.

    "Writing something new using modern tools" is all fun and sparkles, but then you run into the same issues as rsync except without the experience. Then you get attention from attackers, you get security issues, which you have to patch with defensive code which is not appealing to read and zero fun to write. Before you know it your project is "decades of Rust/Zig/Lisp" which nobody wants to touch and you're back at square one. All you've accomplished is give the attackers a few years of low hanging fruit and easy exploits.

    There's a reason why we get a million shiny toys a year but solutions like rsync stay entrenched for decades.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Is that your assumption given that they're using AI? Because it's not at all what I have taken away from their article.

    Is "not properly maintained anymore" your interpretation of them using AI? Or what do you base that on?

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  • [–] 10 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    The whole story started because rsync stopped working for some users. That's "not properly maintained" in my books.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    I don't know the degree to that, but bugs do happen occasionally either way as long as there are changes. In the article, they explain why the changes are necessary. Prioritizing security over no-change-stability seems reasonable and warranted.

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  • [–] -1 points 4 months ago

    The author said:

    yes, there were regressions in some use cases of rsync in the 3.4.3 release. I quite deliberately tried to err on the side of fixing security issues for that release, and there were some valid (but unusual) use cases that got caught up in the changes.

    So as I said, I don't think it's fair to scream at him to work harder. I do think it's fair to worn people that rsync is having issues with stability. The author claims he knows what he's doing and it's all on purpose. You are free to trust him and ignore the whole affair. Other people may prefer to look for alternatives.

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