bug handling policy / interaction with users

[Tim Jansen]

On Saturday 15 March 2003 23:23, Scott Wheeler wrote:
> > It is not realistic to expect that this will change as long as components
> > are done by unpaid volunteers.
> Yes, it is.  Take any (non tech) high profile volunteer organization. 

I was referring to Piotr's remark that 'write-it-yourself or shut-up', in 
nicer words, is often the only realistic answer in a free software project. I 
agree that the tone of the answers wasn't ok.

> > In essence the submitter of the bug said
> > "scrap arts, use mplayer". You may be able to change the way the question
> > has been answered, but certainly not the answer itself.
> Here my point had nothing to do with the technical content -- just rather
> the character of the responses that should be given to the outside world. 
> So, in this case, "KDE is bound to aRts in the short term future and as
> such your request isn't technically doable in the near furure."  That would
> have been fine.

But let's take this case. What would be the right answer? MPlayer certainly 
would be technically doable (as the projects that the submittor refered to 
showed) and it would not conflict with aRts.

In the end, there are two reasons for not doing it:
- you don't have the time or don't want to spend it for that project
- you don't believe that MPlayer is the right solution

How should I communicate this to the user, especially if the user feels like 
arguing (and I already spent _a_lot_ of time arguing with users why I don't 
want to do certain features, or in a different way then they wanted/needed 
it)?

bye..