I can’t imagine just opening a giant PR without having extensive contact and coordination with the maintainer. Almost any amount of incremental safe steps would be preferable to a giant PR, even with extensive communication. I once introduced fully strict typescript into a vanilla js codebase and it took dozens of small PRs to do so. It was made more complicated by the fact that it was a library, but still. The communication made the entire process smooth and let everyone be confident the changes were correct along the way. If I’d done it all at once without any coordination, it would have been faster for me, but at the cost of the maintainer’s sanity and time.

Yeah, that's fair, there are driven people, and people who are pushing for something, right, but in this case, look at the language used:

Progress will not happen until there is new maintainer. XZ for C has sparse commit log too. Dennis you are better off waiting until new maintainer happens or fork yourself. Submitting patches here has no purpose these days. The current maintainer lost interest or doesn't care to maintain anymore. It is sad to see for a repo like this. [src]

Tons of emotional button-pushing and pressure, but not on technical grounds. Just trying to make the dev feel crappy about themselves.

hmm ok. Yeah idk, even from an organization aspect, i still wouldn't consider that to be ok. Test files that patch code on the fly is a recipe for a nightmare of maintenance. Which i suppose is the idea here considering that it's malicious code lol.

i know it's rather involved, i've been tailing it from the sidelines, though like i said, i am not a developer, so in terms of code and maintaining code im blind there. But everything else i understand.

It's definitely an interesting situation to observe.

that much i picked up on, though i didn't make it very clear. I did mention that alternative though.

I vote on an exception for big corps. Fuck you nvidia.

"You're dumb" is disrespectful, but "your code is shit" isn't? How does the latter not reasonably imply the former?

Being respectful is taking the time to moderate "your code is shit" to something like "your code is not acceptable". You might even go a modicum further into kindness with "there are aspects of your code I need you to improve".

All express the same idea, some will leave the listener more open to internalizing the criticism.

Sure it comes off as aggressive ultimatums, but when I worked on New Jersey I saw numerous arguments between passionate coders who really cared about their work and spoke on these loud voices with aggressive gesticulations and gestures, and it was frightening. But, when you took apart the arguments, it was all about “the code” this, and “the standard” that, and very little “you suck” and “you’re dumb”. And, when the argument was settled, these passionate people were still friends.

I used to work for a guy like that. He was aware of how a lot of people perceived him and was working on it but it never really bothered me when he slipped because like you said it wasn't a personal attack, he was just trying to make us get the work done to his standards. There were multiple times he would come to me and apologize after we finished something and I was just like "well you were right so I'm not really worried about it".

Shit, sensitivity training works. Please don't show this to my HR team....