Nostr Web Client

Nostr is a giant shit show. The fact that our software interoperates at all is a miracle and probably just a temporary anomaly. Given enough time, the relentless breaking changes being made to published NIPs will eventually break everything.

Linux succeeded because "WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE". For nostr to succeed, changes must "NOT BREAK EXISTING IMPLEMENTATIONS". There shouldn't be any exceptions to that EVEN IF THE IMPLEMENTATION WAS NON-COMPLIANT.

Pay close attention to Linus right here:

> Are you saying that pulseaudio is entering on some weird loop if the

> returned value is not -EINVAL? That seems a bug at pulseaudio.

Mauro, SHUT THE FUCK UP!

It's a bug alright - in the kernel. How long have you been a

maintainer? And you *still* haven't learnt the first rule of kernel

maintenance?

If a change results in user programs breaking, it's a bug in the

kernel. We never EVER blame the user programs. How hard can this be to

understand?

Linus doesn't want to break pulseaudio EVEN THOUGH pulseaudio was doing the wrong thing.

It seems like every week I find a NIP that I've coded for has changed. This last week I think it happened three times already. Sometimes it's a small change and I quickly update my code. But I can't read all the PRs, and I'm afraid dozens of small changes have slipped past my notice. Gossip is probably now incompatible with multiple other implementations which happen to have implemented different versions of the same NIPs (some older, some newer).

Even if we didn't have any breaking changes, the simple fact that different software implements different optional NIPs itself presents to end users like broken software. Why does it work in Damus but not Amethyst? Why does it work in Amethyst but not Coracle? That is an even harder problem to solve.

But let's at least solve the easier problem and stop changing NIPs. If you don't like a NIP make a new one, don't break the current one. Even if you think the current one sucks balls and should have never happened. Even if you think there aren't many implementations out there.

Basanta Goswami 1y ago

I was feeling the same. Things changing would be fine, if there was some way of knowing when something has changed, or if we knew the breaking changes, if any, would only get merged once every n months, on a particular date.

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Discussion

Mike Dilger ☑️ 1y ago

Even if we had a list of breaking changes and I could remember that I was compliant up to change #23 then I could see how many new breaking changes I need to keep up with. Not great, but better than what we have now.

Ideally though we have very few breaking changes. I understand sometimes the alternative is horrible and the breaking change is needed to 'save nostr'. I'm okay with it if they are few and far between, and well communicated.

But when people just think "Eh, this NIP could be done better. Let's do it my way. I'm gonna rewrite it" that is where I think things have gone off the deep end. The new ideas are great ones, but they are different, therefore IMHO it needs to be a new NIP, not a change to an existing NIP. Those kinds of changes shouldn't get merged.