Re: [gentoo-user] update problems

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Lee.

On Tue, Sep 29, 2015 at 08:45:10PM +0200, lee wrote:
> Neil Bothwick <neil@××××××××××.uk> writes:

> > Patches are always more welcome than suggestions. "Fix it!" is never as
> > welcome as "here's how". I think it was Canek who said "code talks".

> Do you have an example for such a case?

Yes, many.  I'm a contributor to Emacs, and relatively frequently (perhaps
10 - 30 times a yeaar) somebody reports a bug and simultaneously submits
a patch for it.  This is always well received, and the patch is usually
applied, sometimes with a bit of to and fro and negotiation, sometimes
after waiting for the tedious paperwork to be completed.  One of my own
first contributions was a request for an enhancement (to enable
scrolling during an incremental search) together with a rough, but
working patch.  After some amendments, this was applied.

On the other hand, "wouldn't X be a good idea"s which reach the mailing
list only rarely get taken up by regular contributors - there's only so
much time in the day, and such hackers usually have plenty of Xs of
their own to fill their time with.

> My experience has disproved this claim, and I've even seen people
> fixing stuff multiple times after I told them it's broken and provided
> a perfectly working version before telling them, much better coded,
> which they could have used instead of insisting on their crappy code
> and trying to fix it several times.

That's not very friendly, and hardly inclined to gain extra contributors
for your project.  A gentle guiding hand, helping these other people to
reach a satisfactory fix themselves, would work much better.

[ .... ]

> > On the contrary, it serves to illustrate that you do not grasp the
> > complexity of the situation.

> Perhaps you can enlighten me how it is so difficult to change a message
> from "slot conflict" to "slot conflict (can probably be ignored while
> there are other problems)" and what the complexity is which makes it
> impossible to do so.

It's not difficult, it's just tedious.  Something like that which is
user facing needs to be agreed by the core of the project, and getting
that agreement tends to involve lots of bike shedding on the project
mailing lists - there's always a few people who'll prefer the message to
stay the same.  Then there's all the stuff about writing change logs for
the change and commiting it.  Such a tiny change is scarcely achievable
in less than an hour.  To the core developers, it barely seems worth it.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).