Am Mittwoch, 21. September 2011, 20:17:57 schrieb Brad Hards: > I see lots of comments, so many people care. However there are a lot of > negative comments, so working on such a bug is pretty disheartening for a > developer.
That's true! True as well is that most often the rate of negative comments increases with the time the bug gets no attention or stays unfixed, i.e. most reports start reasonable. After some time ~one month (one minor release) people start to not understand why there is no feedback/fix although there are potentially lots of confirmations/dups and offers to help testing patches. Especially if users try to help by testing patches (i.e. contribute what they are able to) and their attempt to help does not trigger any reaction from the devs. And don't get me wrong, I'm talking about bugs reproducible on different distros and by several users and not feature requests or "personal" bugs. If you want a "perfect" example of this check https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=278891. So it is true as well that "real" bugs are not worked on although they have no negative comments for over a month and even a helpful audience. Not saying that one can demand anything – just stating that "bugs are not fixed because of the negative comments" is not a valid argument per se and of course the "conversation" within a bug report changes over time and that devs do play a role in it. To put it provocative – if you wait long enough every bug report will get a negative comment and thus can be marked as "users' fault that no dev works on it". Of course this also means that those reporting bugs and staying polite are punished because of the people that post comments weeks later. > When I read stuff that is nasty, mean or abusive, I often find something > else to do. Remember that this is a hobby for almost all developers. Very true. True as well though is that if somebody introduces a regression – it is reasonable that one expects the same person to show some interest in the issue and taking care of fixing it. It's not that easy to find that person but as a rule of thumb that's how reasonable people act in a community. If you brake something you fix it. > Another way to look at this is "why haven't you fixed it in the last six > months". If you don't know how, why haven't you learned? On its own that's really a bit of a killer argument and a bit too easy. Just apply it to every day's life and you will see that there are lots of things you criticise because you care yet do not learn in order to change them. And one should distinguish between different bits. Demanding a feature, a bug fix or a regression fix are different things. And demanding that broken things are fixed is not per se wrong – in contrary. The tone can be wrong and the style of doing so. No doubt. And of course one could contribute in other ways than learning, e.g. pay developers for bugs/features that are really annoying or important to oneself/a company but not important enough to the KDE devs to fix them. ~280 votes on the bug – x bugs for the fix. :-) To me it would not make sense to tell people that they cannot demand something because they get it for free but reject that they pay for it as well. To me the tone he used is not ok. But I do understand that if there is a bug (not feature request), reproducible on different distros and by many users with a lot of votes and hardly any attention from the devs over months – that it leads to questions regarding the commitment to fixing bugs of that bit of the KDE project. Even more so if a bug is due to a regression i.e. somebody broke code and does not care about fixing it. I'm not saying that this is the case here - but those issues exist and lead to frustration on user side – as the tone he used leads to frustration on dev side. Denying one or the other would be quite narrow minded IMO. So IMHO it would be useful to distinguish between the reasonable statements and the tone. Though I fully agree that it can be expected of adult people to skip the frustration when commenting and just stick to the facts. So for this bug the facts are that the folder view is a very prominent widget and that renaming is a basic operation. The bug seems to be reproducible by x+1 users on x+1 distros and thus seems "real". So who does he have to ask politely in order to get this fixed? And if asking politely is not what leads to a fix – what else could be done to avoid the blaming game when it comes to bugs (x+1 users on x+1 distros) that stay unfixed for weeks and months? Especially if it is a regression. Sven >> Visit http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-devel#unsub to unsubscribe <<
