can you give an example of "self-congratulatory tone"? is it things like, "this is still 10 times larger than dwarfs", because a statement of fact can not be insolent.

I actually only went through a significant portion of the readme (through the CromFS part) because of your comment, and i just don't see it. I see a person who wrote actually useful software that is multi-platform and gives the positives and negatives of the software they wrote compared to alternatives available today.

In every test DwarFS compared favorably, and on tests where one aspect was marginal, the DwarFS code was better in other regards: power at the wall, extract/read times, etc.

How would it be better presented by a solo developer?

“While this is already impressive, it gets even better.”

I can almost hear “and if you call now, you get this amazing towel for free!”

But judging by the comments here, it seems I’m more sensitive to this tone than most.

that's fair, and i completely missed that. I remember HAProxy used to have similar verbiage on their main page, back when they were the only software load balancer to be able to sustainably manage 10gbit of throughput. I gave a quick scan of the current intro.txt and there's still some ...

> HAProxy offers a fairly complete set of load balancing features, most of which are unfortunately not available in a number of other load balancing products

It seems like a minor nit that could be "fixed", especially since the "it gets better" is in reference to "not only smaller, but also much faster" and it's not an insignificant performance increase, it's 100 times faster. Basically everyone (mostly) uses squashfs, and this absolutely trounces it - according to the author.

anyhow i hope my reply wasn't too extra

Not at all. These things are cultural and on a person by person basis as well. I’m definitely on the low profile side, to a fault.

Thanks for the feedback! I was probably a little too excited when writing the documentation. Reading it again with some distance, I can certainly see why this might be a bit off-putting. I'll keep this in mind for the future!

Well it performs extremely well, and if I wrote it, I’d be proud of it, too.

So would I, but I’m uncomfortable with that tone even in reading, let alone writing. Just an observation, something that jumped out.