Hacker News Reader

Comment by bachmeier | Hacker News Reader

> The usual pattern is a post or response to a bug report, patch or question that is generally helpful but at the same time needlessly nasty or snarky, and with a I-know-better-than-you attitude.

The most infuriating responses come when I've put a bunch of time into constructing a careful bug report (maybe several hours after narrowing down the problem), and some idiot comes along and closes it, telling me to post support questions elsewhere. It usually takes the form of bug report -> here's a workaround -> no, doesn't help -> idiot jumps in and says "Please file support requests elsewhere. I'm closing this."

View on HN

I’ve discovered that as any project becomes larger and involves more people, they all lead to patterns resembling awful enterprise corporate bureaucracies with the same political and cultural repercussions. Patterns that result in folks filing issues in the wrong categories and issue trackers entirely come from bad / misaligned UX but also because the maintainers and contributors are having difficulty accommodating the workflows of users and new contributors. Jenkins is a project where they outright disabled Github issues and everything goes to the JIRA, for example, but somehow Kubernetes is able to handle some issues via Github at least (but only by sharding from what I observe).

In my experience, the larger the project, the more likely you are to get that type of response.

Small, actively maintained projects are often very welcoming and happy to have any help.

This is surprisingly often true with companies too.

There's BS and cool on both sides of PRs.

- MYOB fail, as mentioned, sigh.

- Closing issues before they're resolved. Proper etiquette is to let the filer close it after it's fixed and working.

- People demanding features or making vague trouble reports.

- Submitting a properly-tested PR that fixes an issue without need for a fix-it issue.

- Committers open to some globally-beneficial change only to change their mind after it's already done.

- People refactoring your commit with something better.

- Rust and a lot of small languages have tiny, good communities of generally humble badasses.

- People changing whitespaces or switching to British grammar. SMH.

I look at it this way: you gotta take the shit with sugar. Not trying to contribute upstream is consuming without producing... I'm against this because it helps no one and it's uncool.

Can you expand the acronyms please? Except BS, I figured that one out

MYOB, Mind Your Own Business

PR pull request

SMH = shake/shaking my head

Reply on news.ycombinator.com