> Well, you get a problem solved. One that was probably bothering you or stopping you from doing some work.
You ignored the entire premise. Weird, because I repeated it multiple times. (And I don't understand how the comment can even make any sense unless you get the premise.)
To be clear: the scenario outlined above is one where I'm filing a bug report against a software project that I do not use and do not ever intend to use. There's no way a bug in the software can be showstopper for me if the software in question has no effect on the success or failure of whatever show I'm running.
To be clear: the scenario outlined above is one where I'm filing a bug report against a software project that I do not use and do not ever intend to use.
I think your premise is specious. Who files detailed bug reports on a piece of software that they have never and will never use?
What is the scenario where someone would bother doing this?
What is the scenario where they even have the knowledge to file this detailed bug report since they lack any context on the software in question?
That you're here having trouble grappling with the suggestion that such a scenario is even plausible is evidence of the cynical depths we've reached. Even in the case that you're unable to understand why, does the "why" really matter? It happens, and that's what matters.
That seems unnecessarily rude. Also, you still haven’t offered up a plausible scenario of why you would magnanimously look at my OSS project that you have no intention of ever using, find a bug, and submit a bug report, exhortations of circa 2008 Clay Shirky notwithstanding.
Am I supposed to refrain from being seen as unkind to someone tacitly accusing me of lying? I gave an answer before you ever even asked the question. I don't know what you want, I don't know why you think you deserve my time and energy in light of the incoming rudeness directed my way, and I don't know how you can't see that expecting it is in stark contradiction to the position you're taking.
Yeah, seems so. I've re-read the original message now.
Here are two thoughts for your consideration:
- This is a discussion about FLOSS projects' lives and their maintainers' experiences. Given that your approach is an outlier, your observations don't have a lot of relevance to an average FLOSS project. Nor, as a consequence, does the opinion of "who owes who".
- Consider, in abstract, two projects. One has only bug reports from actual, motivated users. Another has 10% of bug reports from its users and 90% of "drive-by" bug reports. Starting with a certain size, I think you can imagine how the second project might have the maintainer overwhelmed, unmotivated, and/or spending a lot of time on code that is almost never run in production.
Software is not math; there are always parts that are more used, and always some bugs that are ignored because they're non-trivial to fix, and the tradeoffs are not worth the developer's time. Unless you're DJB, I guess.
> This is a discussion about FLOSS projects' lives and their maintainers' experiences.
It's not. It's rooted at mjw1007's comment "When I file a bug report[…]" and, before that, the linked article where antirez deals with the same matter that I'm discussing.
A later comment—the one that I responded to—tries to convince us to focus on the maintainer and sell the appreciation-as-compensation, maintainers-get-nothing, and, implicitly, the bug-reports-have-negative-value perspective that is pushed in the circles I referenced above. And that's the problem. As I wrote elsewhere, filing bug reports takes more effort than not filing them. By myopically portraying the maintainer as if they're a protagonist in some Gary Stu fanfic about the world, we end up with a take that fails to consider all the relevant details, and that's the attitude that antirez admonishes. Please revisit both the article and the comment linked above.
(I'm not really interested in responding further to this conversation.)
You ignored the entire premise. Weird, because I repeated it multiple times. (And I don't understand how the comment can even make any sense unless you get the premise.)
To be clear: the scenario outlined above is one where I'm filing a bug report against a software project that I do not use and do not ever intend to use. There's no way a bug in the software can be showstopper for me if the software in question has no effect on the success or failure of whatever show I'm running.