Never reported upstream? [LWN.net]

Never reported upstream?

Posted Jun 9, 2009 13:08 UTC (Tue) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185)
In reply to: Never reported upstream? by kevinbsmith
Parent article: Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

You know, normal people don't feel the need to "evaluate" the community before installing an application, especially not "including the bug reports". That alone marks you as Not a Normal User, but someone who can be expected to be a little more flexible and knowledgeable. And no, that is not an insult either. (And if Okular crashes on startup, you also get a nice window that helps you file a bug report.)

If you really had wanted to make a suggestion instead of scoring a silly little point at the tail of a silly discussion on a news website, you could have, like, contacted the Okular team directly. There is quite a prominent link on their website to http://okular.kde.org/contact.php, which gives you plenty of ways to contact them and ask them to add a link to bugs.kde.org.

So, you could, very easily, have made just this little suggestion of yours, without resorting to phrases like:

" Oddly, neither the Okular user web page, nor the Okular KDE web page seem to have any links to any sort of bug tracker. So I can't tell what the upstream developers may have said about it."

Because it isn't odd -- it's just an oversight, most KDE applications don't have a link to the bug database because that's in the application menu. It is seldom needed. But it didn't make it impossible for you to figure out what the upstrream developers might have said about, because a) there have been links to their opinion as expressed in blogs and b) you could easily have reached them because the means to do so are prominently displayed on the okular website.

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Never reported upstream?

Posted Jun 12, 2009 6:41 UTC (Fri) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

> You know, normal people don't feel the need to "evaluate" the
> community before installing an application, especially not
> "including the bug reports". That alone marks you as Not a Normal
> User, but someone who can be expected to be a little more flexible
> and knowledgeable.

I recognize that you are not trying to be insulting by insisting that people such as me who do this are abnormal. However, you are being insulting.

There's nothing wrong with researching something you're going to invest in. It is a matter of thoroughness, care, attention to detail, and of course interest and available time, rather than normality or the lack thereof.