bug handling policy / interaction with users

[Frerich Raabe]

On Sunday 16 March 2003 04:03, Roberto H. Alsina wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 16 2003 at 02:29:17am +0100, Guillaume Laurent wrote:
> > I agree, but this has its limits as well. KDE can't bend over backwards
> > for users, neither can it for developers.
>
> KDE actualy CAN bend over for both. The matter is if KDE _will_ do it
> for any of them.

I think starting to talk how KDE developers should/could/will "bend over" for 
users is a little exaggerated. It really boils down to "Don't be an ass 
towards your users who are not as well-informed about your application as you 
are.".

Of course you are not required to do anything, to behave like an employee and 
the bug reporter is a boss, but I don't understand how you took it from the 
one (the current) extreme to the other extreme. If you care about feedback 
from the users (and I figured everybody agreed that this particular report is 
not a rant), and you do because that's part of the responsibilities which 
come with having your application in the main repository and thus exposed to 
a large userbase, you're shooting your own foot if you stall a bug report 
like that. That might not be apparent to you in the short term, but it will 
be in the long term.

For you, as the uber-l33t hacker, who gets a lot of bug reports and knows the 
codebase inside out, a reply like "Go take your daydreaming elsewhere" might 
be funny or you might think that'd demonstrate guruish grumpyness, but for 
the other end the difference of that reply to "I don't think I will do this, 
for the reasons x y z." is a major one, because what you reply is a big part 
of the interface to the KDE project the client sees. Reasons like "It's so 
hard to develop this with aRts in the background" or "I get no appreciation 
at all" or "My dog died today" might be explanations, but they're not 
justifications.

- Frerich