Re: Why is Evolution and Epiphany now a part of gnome-core?
On Jan 17, 2011, at 12:48 PM, Carl Fink wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 12:26:17PM -0500, Hal Vaughan wrote:
>
>> This is an example of why I've been moving away from FOSS. Someone makes
>> a good point in a bug report and the programmer/developer/maintainer
>> throws it back in his face, which allows the bug to be closed out quickly.
>>
>> I think it's a legitimate concern and just because one person pointed it
>> out does not mean it only effects one person.
>
> It's ridiculous, and as you write unfortunately typical. I recall getting
> similar "Sorry, I don't care" stuff from developers as far back as when
> StarOffice was first freed.
>
> What to do? Well, in my case, I switch to different FOSS. So ... I guess I
> move to something other than Debian. Oh well.
I rarely file bug reports for FOSS anymore due to responses like this. But I have started communicating with people in some projects when something is wrong (either on the forum or on mailing lists). I tried to explain an issue when I filed a bug with OOo about margins, but the responses showed they were not concerned with listening to the issue, only with saying, "We're right, so go away."
At one point I was trying to design a web interface that would be easy to customize for LIRC so you could control your home devices through LIRC from a webpage you could pull up on your smart phone or on a PDA and asked for help. I got nothing. I asked again, knowing that the people who were behind LIRC were on the list. I finally left a message saying, "I wanted to add to the project and asked for help several times and was ignored or told to RTFM when I had stated the info wasn't in TFM. I've scrapped my project and LIRC devs might want to consider not ignoring help requests in the future." I watched and saw everyone say, "Well, he must have asked for help wrong." (Hey, I've read ESR's "How to Ask for Help" and found most of it common sense and I follow it.) Not one looked for my original requests to see if I was rude or anything.
I've been in discussions on MacPorts for KDE on OS X and found some helpful people, but I have to say some devs are too busy being right to listen.
I could list more, but I've seen enough cases where bug reports are met with dismissals (and often rude or condescending ones, like the one cited early in this thread) that I don't file bug reports for FOSS unless I know the project and know it's worth the time to file one.
I think this is a classic case of some devs being so into themselves and their projects that they don't realize they come across as Sheldon Cooper when they ignore others.
I retired at 45, thanks to my business, which was based on my own custom software. The first program I released to run on my clients' computers was in Java, within 6 months after I learned Java and OOP. In the next 18 months that version was in use, I had fewer than 5 bug reports (because I tested the hell out of it before releasing it). But I had to respond to each bug report and usually had the fix out within 12 hours. I would have lost a lot of money if I had been as dismissive of bug reports as some developers are.
Hal
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