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There’s a story about Linus Torvalds that’s always stuck with me, from the early days of the Linux Kernel.
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<div class="">The story goes that Linus was mostly working on hardware from companies like DEC, and other boxes with lots of RAM. The trouble is, mere mortals had almost no RAM, and it was hard to run the kernel on low-memory systems. But since low-memory
systems were the norm back then (maybe now too, eh Mobile?), Linus wrote a patch that solved a problem he didn’t have (linux-should-work-on-low-ram-systems) so that he could increase his contributor and user numbers. And it worked, massively.
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<div class="">A few weeks ago we had a MakeDrive bug filed by a person wanting to try and hack MakeDrive into Github’s Atom editor (<a href="https://github.com/mozilla/makedrive/issues/451" class="">https://github.com/mozilla/makedrive/issues/451</a>). His
problem was that we use Webmaker Auth, and it meant running a Webmaker Login server. Unless you’re Webmaker, using Webmaker Auth makes no sense.</div>
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<div class="">Ali and I decided to tackle the problem by making our MakeDrive authentication pluggable and configurable (<a href="https://github.com/mozilla/makedrive/pull/463" class="">https://github.com/mozilla/makedrive/pull/463</a>). We decided to use
<a href="http://passportjs.org/" class="">http://passportjs.org/</a> as the foundation for our authentication. We then wrote wrappers around various passport providers, and now you can use a whole bunch of different auth methods.</div>
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<div class="">We chose to make our default configuration a ‘zeroconfig’ provider, where you automatically get a ‘root’ user and don’t have to authenticate ever. In other words, we wanted to make it so that MakeDrive "Just Worked” out of the box with no authentication
layer, and you could test it, develop it, etc. as quickly as possible. It’s not what we need (we’ll use Webmaker Auth) but it’s what anyone that isn’t us needs.</div>
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<div class="">I don’t have time to hack MakeDrive into Atom—but I want to see this guy succeed, and I’m going to fix all the things he finds that are in his way.</div>
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<div class="">The reason I’m sharing this email with you is that I think it’s important to prioritize certain types of fixes that we don’t need in order to help unblock people that we *do* need. It’s not always a docs issue: sometimes you have to make your
code work in a way that is more approachable to your community.</div>
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<div class="">Dave</div>
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