Your title really rubs me the wrong way. This isn't bitrot, it's actually quite the opposite: the problem showed up because he does actively maintain the code, he made the latest release compatible with future versions of the standard Python distribution.

He's standing up to say he's going to honor his responsibility to this code even though he doesn't enjoy it anymore, but that that doesn't include writing html parsers, and you come along and scream 'bitrot'. Sorry, but that's kind of an assholish thing of you to do.

Its performance is getting worse over time because maintaining its speed requires more maintenance than anyone is willing to give it, at least so far. I would call that bit rot too.

I think both of you agree that the original author deserves only thanks.

But that's not what the linked article is about at all. If you have benchmarks and you want to write that article, by all means, do it.

I think you must have woken up on the wrong side of the bed. I certainly had no intention of impugning the author of the code, and in fact, I thanked him with the thread-opening comment.

Personally, I can't/won't pitch in on BeautfulSoup, but I thought maybe if I posted the page to this forum, a better hacker than myself might jump in. We can across the behavior he describes in building TrailBehind, and I just thought I'd share with the community.

As for bit rot, that's a pretty old term that just means code breaks down as it ages.

'Bit rot' is a pretty loaded term, it's not as benign as you're pretending it is. It's one of those things that you can say about your own project, or in pointing out a specific problem within a codebase, but to say it about a project as a whole that has an active maintainer (especially after he releases an update to avoid bit rot going forward and then asks for help dealing with the upstream problems), that's assholish. Sorry, but it just is.

Assuming malice over the OP's protests is kind of an assholish thing for you to do. I don't view 'bit rot' as a loaded term and if the OP says he doesn't either then perhaps you should take him at his word and not accuse him of 'pretending' otherwise. If a large part of the community sees the term in the same light as you do then perhaps it was a poor choice of title but I see nothing to indicate that there was bad intent here.

I'm not assuming malice, I don't care if he's intentionally being rude or not. A lack of intent isn't a free pass. This site gets visited by a lot of developers, probably a lot of whom use Python, probably a fair share of those use BS, and accusing the project of rotting, especially when that's not what's actually happening, could have an actual negative impact on it going forward.

Titles get changed here all the time, why couldn't this one be changed to just a simple statement of fact, something like: "Beautiful Soup switches parsers, developer requests help replacing lost functionality"? Instead we get this sensational and misleading title, and, yeah, it pisses me off.

Yeah, that would have been a great headline. Then, no one would have read the post, no one would find out the guy would like some help, and the project would be that much closer to sinking into oblivion.

Enough of this nonsense. I think the highly popular nature of the post, and the productive discussion that ensued, means that the post and headline were good. I certainly did the guy more good than harm, by bringing the attention of a community of hackers to this issue.

This reminds me of when I was editor of my college newspaper, and I wrote a headline that said "Student Raped in Gesling Stadium." The university and the campus cops all wanted us to say sexual assault and were pitching a fit. But we felt the strong language was justified, and we printed the word RAPE in big bold block letters. As a result, there was immediately hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on improving campus security.

In this case, I wrote that headline because I knew people would read it, and I knew that they wanted to read it, and I knew that they should read it. The last thing I was doing was trying to give the guy a hard time.

I think Bit Rot is pretty catchy.

If you didn't assume bad intent (or even if you did, really) then perhaps you should have approached this more civilly. You called his actions 'assholish' and accuse him of 'pretending'. These terms appear to me as an attack on the author and not just his headline. For someone complaining of a rude headline your comments can come off as awfully rude themselves.

You may be right, but I approached it with the idea that he had already made one assholish statement and so there was a higher probability that he was an asshole in general. It takes one to know one, I suppose, but I try to limit my assholishness to people who have already demonstrated a good bit of their own.

I've had a couple of friends bitten by BeautifulSoup's sudden loss of functionality; dropping in html5lib's BeautifulSoup mode turned out to be a more than adequate replacement.

He is not saying lack of enough money, but is saying lack of enough time.

Yes, he is also saying it's about the money:

"To make the time for Beautiful Soup development, I'd need enough money to make it my job, and that's too much money to ask for or to expect."

Money == Time