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Apart from being notified with an email or similar when a new issue has been created, what other annoyances does a maintainer have to deal with? I mean, is the

Apart from being notified with an email or similar when a new issue has been created, what other annoyances does a maintainer have to deal with? I mean, is the number of open issues raising what annoys you? or is it for not being able to keep organized the issues?

goostavos 10y ago
I have a project of medium popularity (~4k stars on github). A lot of the annoyance comes from _bad_ issues, or pushy people that want to know why X is done Y way -- after all, only morons do X _y_ way, or just answering the same questions over, and over, and over. Something like 70% of every issue/email I've ever received could easily be auto replied with "please provide version, platform, code to reproduce, etc.." the number of people that will post an issue that just says "it doesn't work" or "how do you do X?" wears on you after awhile. The open issues for a medium sized project are (I consider) a metric of the project's overall health. So, if you want to keep your tracker clean, you've gotta put on your administrative hat and spend time grooming things, which takes an energy toll. Developing is fun, fixing real issues is fun, repeatedly teaching people how to ask a useful question is not fun. Also, pull requests can be the most stressful of all. People are extremely entitled about pull requests. The number of reasons why something might not get merged in right away or at all is _massive_ (and often simple: I'm busy). However, a lot of people seem to take it as personal attack that their glorious work was not immediately commented on/reviewed/liked/pulled/etc.. All of that can add up to a lot of stress around a project from which you draw no income.
- majewsky 10y ago
  > just answering the same questions over, and over, and over. Have you considered creating an FAQ? > Something like 70% of every issue/email I've ever received could easily be auto replied with "please provide version, platform, code to reproduce, etc.." Github has issue templates now. This could fix at least some of these incomplete submissions.
  - goostavos 10y ago
    Whoa, TIL that they added issue templates! That's pretty awesome. That should indeed help cut down on some of the administration work required when answering issues.
  - adekok 10y ago
    > Have you considered creating an FAQ? For me, we have a FAQ, "man" pages, on-line web documentation, and documentation in the config files. There will always be some idiot who is incapable of reading any documentation. My personal favorite is a debugging error messages which is something like: Failed reading file X: no permissions. Please check that file X is owned by user U and writeable by group G" People post such messages to the mailing list about once a month, asking "What does that mean?" There is no good answer which will satisfy them. If you tell them that the message is self-explanatory, they get mad at you for not explaining it. If you ignore there messages, they re-post repeatedly, asking "Why doesn't anyone help me?" There's a subset of people who just shouldn't be using software.
- x0x0 10y ago
  I wrote a bunch of code on github related to model inference. The inner loops are executed trillions of times in regular usage. Part of the value my code provides is I've spent several hundred hours going through it with vtune on different xeons. I regularly get mail saying my code is structured incorrectly or critiquing the code as if I'm a novice developer. It's very frustrating.

goostavos 10y ago

I have a project of medium popularity (~4k stars on github). A lot of the annoyance comes from _bad_ issues, or pushy people that want to know why X is done Y way -- after all, only morons do X _y_ way, or just answering the same questions over, and over, and over. Something like 70% of every issue/email I've ever received could easily be auto replied with "please provide version, platform, code to reproduce, etc.." the number of people that will post an issue that just says "it doesn't work" or "how do you do X?" wears on you after awhile. The open issues for a medium sized project are (I consider) a metric of the project's overall health. So, if you want to keep your tracker clean, you've gotta put on your administrative hat and spend time grooming things, which takes an energy toll. Developing is fun, fixing real issues is fun, repeatedly teaching people how to ask a useful question is not fun. Also, pull requests can be the most stressful of all. People are extremely entitled about pull requests. The number of reasons why something might not get merged in right away or at all is _massive_ (and often simple: I'm busy). However, a lot of people seem to take it as personal attack that their glorious work was not immediately commented on/reviewed/liked/pulled/etc.. All of that can add up to a lot of stress around a project from which you draw no income.

majewsky 10y ago
> just answering the same questions over, and over, and over. Have you considered creating an FAQ? > Something like 70% of every issue/email I've ever received could easily be auto replied with "please provide version, platform, code to reproduce, etc.." Github has issue templates now. This could fix at least some of these incomplete submissions.
- goostavos 10y ago
  Whoa, TIL that they added issue templates! That's pretty awesome. That should indeed help cut down on some of the administration work required when answering issues.
- adekok 10y ago
  > Have you considered creating an FAQ? For me, we have a FAQ, "man" pages, on-line web documentation, and documentation in the config files. There will always be some idiot who is incapable of reading any documentation. My personal favorite is a debugging error messages which is something like: Failed reading file X: no permissions. Please check that file X is owned by user U and writeable by group G" People post such messages to the mailing list about once a month, asking "What does that mean?" There is no good answer which will satisfy them. If you tell them that the message is self-explanatory, they get mad at you for not explaining it. If you ignore there messages, they re-post repeatedly, asking "Why doesn't anyone help me?" There's a subset of people who just shouldn't be using software.
x0x0 10y ago
I wrote a bunch of code on github related to model inference. The inner loops are executed trillions of times in regular usage. Part of the value my code provides is I've spent several hundred hours going through it with vtune on different xeons. I regularly get mail saying my code is structured incorrectly or critiquing the code as if I'm a novice developer. It's very frustrating.