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I think this article is fundamentally very bad, for one specific reason. --- Me: "Hi! I just found a bug in your program. If you do A, B and C, X doesn't work

I think this article is fundamentally very bad, for one specific reason. --- Me: "Hi! I just found a bug in your program. If you do A, B and C, X doesn't work properly." Maintainer: "Our test case covers A and B and works perfectly." Me: "Yes, C is an edge-case your testcase didn't include, and which is what breaks everything horribly. You know more about modifying your testcase than I do, but I guarantee you that when you make the change, this will fail consistently." Maintainer: "You must provide us a new testcase." Me: "I don't know how to do that." Maintainer: "Our existing test cases work fine." Me: [ Gives up before frustration turns to anger ] This happened. https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/7872 https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/7872 -- Me (on a sadly now-defunct forum): "I think it would be awesome if we ported my favorite application to this new OS" Owner of application, unexpectedly: [ Long rant about the difficulty of porting things and that my ideas are going to affect him personally ] Me: [ Freaks out ] Forum maintainers: [ Words of comfort ] Sadly there are no copies of the post in the Web Archive (I just downloaded the entire forum to check), but I remember the conversation well. -- New contributor: "Here's a patch to this program. It fixes this and that problem." Long-term maintainer: "We don't do things that way." New contributor: "It'll improve performance and simplify the code." Long-term maintainer: [ Blah blah blahblahblahblahblahblahblahblah(...) ] New contributor: "...?!" This is what came to mind when I thought about systemd. --- The thing the article is completely missing is the political element. It exists, it's real, I wasn't warned I'd get bitten, and I have cognitive issues and don't know how to resolve confrontation in some situations. I generally avoid open source communities nowadays. My experiences discussing closed-source software have consistently been less toxic!

dasil003 9y ago
Patch politics aside, you can at least understand the problem and come up with workarounds based on your understanding.
JdeBP 9y ago
What is actually in that GitHub issue does not match your story. For example, what we can see there is you providing an example with the concrete information all replaced with "(removed)", the other person asking for said concrete information, and you replying that you don't know it, even though you clearly did and removed it from your test case.
- exikyut 9y ago
  I must admit that I did have second thoughts about posting this after I'd properly typed it out. It sounded less pointed in my head. You are technically right. The specific issue was that youtube-dl had a bug downloading WAVs from soundcloud. The WAV in question was privately linked to me, and it was the first WAV I'd ever encountered. It's not possible to search for "has WAV" on soundcloud. I had no idea how to find one, and was unsure how to go about uploading test media (eg if it would be taken down etc). I'll admit that yeah there was some laziness and "just fix it" and unimpressedness in there. I'm at fault to an extent.

dasil003 9y ago

Patch politics aside, you can at least understand the problem and come up with workarounds based on your understanding.

JdeBP 9y ago

What is actually in that GitHub issue does not match your story. For example, what we can see there is you providing an example with the concrete information all replaced with "(removed)", the other person asking for said concrete information, and you replying that you don't know it, even though you clearly did and removed it from your test case.

exikyut 9y ago
I must admit that I did have second thoughts about posting this after I'd properly typed it out. It sounded less pointed in my head. You are technically right. The specific issue was that youtube-dl had a bug downloading WAVs from soundcloud. The WAV in question was privately linked to me, and it was the first WAV I'd ever encountered. It's not possible to search for "has WAV" on soundcloud. I had no idea how to find one, and was unsure how to go about uploading test media (eg if it would be taken down etc). I'll admit that yeah there was some laziness and "just fix it" and unimpressedness in there. I'm at fault to an extent.