Alan Mackenzie <a...@muc.de> writes: > Hello, Lee. > > On Tue, Sep 29, 2015 at 08:45:10PM +0200, lee wrote: >> Neil Bothwick <n...@digimed.co.uk> writes: > >> > Patches are always more welcome than suggestions. "Fix it!" is never as >> > welcome as "here's how". I think it was Canek who said "code talks". > >> Do you have an example for such a case? > > Yes, many. I'm a contributor to Emacs, and relatively frequently (perhaps > 10 - 30 times a yeaar) somebody reports a bug and simultaneously submits > a patch for it. This is always well received,
I sent in a contribution to emacs, too, and never even heard anything back. > On the other hand, "wouldn't X be a good idea"s which reach the mailing > list only rarely get taken up by regular contributors - there's only so > much time in the day, and such hackers usually have plenty of Xs of > their own to fill their time with. That apparently means that nobody is allowed to suggest something and/or to discuss a suggestion, and that everyone must have an "I don't care" attitude. >> My experience has disproved this claim, and I've even seen people >> fixing stuff multiple times after I told them it's broken and provided >> a perfectly working version before telling them, much better coded, >> which they could have used instead of insisting on their crappy code >> and trying to fix it several times. > > That's not very friendly, How is it not friendly to point out a bug when you find one, at the same time pointing to what fixes it? > and hardly inclined to gain extra contributors > for your project. A gentle guiding hand, helping these other people to > reach a satisfactory fix themselves, would work much better. It wasn't my project but software I'm using and had made a fork of. So I noticed what upstream changed, found it to be broken, fixed it and notified them that it's broken and how, and that there's a fix they can use. They didn't use the fix, made a couple attempts to fix their own code until it finally worked, and though it now works, their code still sucks. So the most logical conclusion is not to report bugs and not to provide any fixes or contributions, and not dare to suggest anything because at best, it leads to nothing, and most of the time, you're being told that you're a clueless idiot and to shut up. OTOH, you often times get to hear and/or see that peoples' contributions and help are wanted and that there are always not enough contributers. But why ask for more contributers when contributions aren't wanted anyway? >> > On the contrary, it serves to illustrate that you do not grasp the >> > complexity of the situation. > >> Perhaps you can enlighten me how it is so difficult to change a message >> from "slot conflict" to "slot conflict (can probably be ignored while >> there are other problems)" and what the complexity is which makes it >> impossible to do so. > > It's not difficult, it's just tedious. Something like that which is > user facing needs to be agreed by the core of the project, and getting > that agreement tends to involve lots of bike shedding on the project > mailing lists - there's always a few people who'll prefer the message to > stay the same. That is a bad situation which might help to explain why projects neither want contributions, nor contributers. Yet it doesn't mean that those who would like to contribute shall receive the blame for the bad situation the project is in, nor that it is wise to put them off. It also indicates that the argument "go ahead and supply a patch" is entirely inappropriate beyond being merely condescending, and that arguing along the lines that the contributers aren't being payed and that /you/ aren't contributing anyway is even worse. None of them are acceptable under these conditions. They are irrelevant. > Then there's all the stuff about writing change logs for the change > and commiting it. How is that being too tedious? If it really is too tedious, is there a way to make it less tedious? > Such a tiny change is scarcely achievable in less than an hour. To > the core developers, it barely seems worth it. So nobody do anything because it isn't worth it. That's a great attitude. -- Again we must be afraid of speaking of daemons for fear that daemons might swallow us. Finally, this fear has become reasonable.
