5 ms·

As an OSS maintainer, the way to show this is to show up with a full reproduction. "Run exactly this and it crashes". Can't reproduce it? Well... you can of co

by rtpg 4y ago

As an OSS maintainer, the way to show this is to show up with a full reproduction. "Run exactly this and it crashes". Can't reproduce it? Well... you can of course still report it but "I'm not an idiot" is a pretty weak signal. Everyone gets lost in the weeds, and debugging a problem only for it to be an issue in some unstated part of the project is very exhausting.

sph 4y ago
As someone that has recently opened a bug report on a popular open source project, with a very simple and 100% effective reproduction process, I had a back and forth with the maintainer telling me to "what happens if you do X instead?" What is the point of me providing an example case if the ones that know the internals of their code don't try to reproduce my bug? Yeah, I know OSS devs do not have time/are unpaid. My point is however complete your bug report is, nothing guarantees it won't go stale without anyone having taken a real look at it. In my experience 90% of bug reports, on OSS or commercial products, die this way.