Re: rudeness in changelogs

[Steve Greenland <steveg@moregruel.net>]

On 10-Jan-05, 13:55 (CST), Gunnar Wolf <gwolf@gwolf.org> wrote: 
> Steve Greenland dijo [Sat, Jan 08, 2005 at 06:44:24PM -0600]:
> > Not really called for, but I understand the frustration with people who
> > have nothing better to do than nag, and (for the second bug) without
> > even checking the existing bugs!
> 
> Remember that, although it is expected from seasoned Debian users and
> developers to do this, there is no hard requisite on not duplicating
> bug reports. After all, you as the maintainer can merge them. It is
> nicer if the user saves you the work, but anyway, he is not required
> to do it.

It's one thing for a user to report a bug w/o checking: she's helping me
out, and while it would be nice to avoid a duplicate, I'd rather have
two reports than none.

In the specific case of new version nagging, there's absolutely no
excuse for not checking to see if it's already been requested. There's
no urgency to it, and if the user already has the time to monitor
upstream releases, then checking the BTS should be no big deal.

> Well... DJB was not trying to be specially nice - Quite the
> contrary. Take a look at the thread [1], specially at DJB's [2] and
> his student's [3] messages (specially [3], it illustrates the point
> better).

I'm well aware of DJB's position on the topic. I'm sad to see that he's
promoting such assholery in his classes, but not very surprised.

Steve
-- 
Steve Greenland
    The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating
    system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the
    world.       -- seen on the net