Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

"Patches welcome!" is a common refrain on mailing lists. Even if someone lacks the ability to diagnose and fix an issue, they can file a bug in the project’s system. Indeed, there’s an unwritten social expectation that users file a bug.

Sadly, these are often just empty words. "Patches welcome" can be a seemingly-polite way of saying "your problem is not important to me. Go solve it yourself and I’ll accept your solution." And telling a user to go file a bug can be equally dismissive, especially if the bug-filing process is unpleasant.

— Ben Cotton

There aren't any easily accessible footguns. If you go to the trouble of manually assembling a footgun, footbullets, and footgunpowder, all from scratch, and then point it at your foot and fire, then yeah, you might lose a toe. But considering the amount of effort you had to go to to build the footgun in the first place, you should probably have known better.

— Josh Triplett

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Quotes of the week

Posted May 6, 2015 16:16 UTC (Wed) by dunlapg (guest, #57764) [Link] (2 responses)

"Patches welcome" can be a seemingly-polite way of saying "your problem is not important to me.

Not so much "not important" as, "not something that's a big enough priority to get attention from me any time soon". But yes, that's pretty much exactly what it's saying.

And in many contexts it's also a hint (sometimes gentle, sometimes less so), that if this is so important to you, perhaps rather than expecting other people to do work for you for free, you could consider doing a bit of work yourself. This is particularly the case when it's a company using the software to make money asking the community to provide something for them.

Quotes of the week

Posted May 7, 2015 15:39 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

Well it's only seemingly-polite, but actually is kinda of a snarky-asshole thing to say.

Regardless of what it meant to represent what is going to be interpreted from the person being subjected to such a reply is:

"I couldn't give a shit less about your problems or issues. In fact I don't want to even put the _thought_ into considering this. Instead I am going to type out this two word response because I need to put the absolutely minimum of effort into this bug report and even that is rather bothersome. Please fuck off and don't ever file another bug report again unless I have something to directly gain from it (and what exactly I'd like to see is something I'll just make sure to keep a secret from you.)"

Rather it would be better to say: "Sorry, I don't really have the time to fix this at this time. If you can work up some solution of your own we will make sure to incorporate it if it can pass a review." or "We really don't have the resources for this at this time, maybe you can do something to round up some other developers or contribute code to help fix it. Here is wiki we have setup to help document development efforts and standards for contributors. The more help we can get for dealing with current issues the more time we can spend extending our program for features like this."

Even a "Sorry, this is not something we will consider doing at this time. It is the outside the scope of the mission of the current project. It's possible that you can get what you want from X software or Y group."

It's too much to expect that other people will interpret and act on 'seemingly polite' or 'gentle hints' messages. It's like a wife getting pissed of at a husband because he didn't pick up on subtle hints while he is running around trying to fix the house and is completely distracted. If you want something from somebody you sometimes really just have to spell it out for them.

That way then can get a feeling of welcome-ness and empowerment rather then just feeling like they were just dismissed as being unimportant or uninteresting.

Quotes of the week

Posted May 7, 2015 16:20 UTC (Thu) by dunlapg (guest, #57764) [Link]

Instead I am going to type out this two word response because I need to put the absolutely minimum of effort into this bug report and even that is rather bothersome.

Just to clarify, I was actually talking about when someone asks for a new feature. (I realize the original context was about bug reports, so I should have made myself more clear -- sorry.) Regarding bugs, I think that as far as possible, a bug in an officially supported bit of functionality ought to be considered the community's job to fix; and even for "experimental" or "unsupported" functionality, "patches welcome" is almost never the right response to a bug report.

And whether it's rude or not depends a lot on the context. I've usually heard it said in my project in response to 1) some user demanding that we really should be pursuing their pet feature, or 2) some company that makes a profit from our software asking for a feature that would primarily be of use to them.

In the case of #1, it's pushing back to someone who's being rude to us. In the case of #2, it's a gentle reminder to someone who really should know better that open source is a cooperative effort.