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Comment by armagon | Hacker News Reader

The same could be said, in a domain more familiar to HNers, of bug reports.

If you don't take bug reports as tweets, or in e-mails, but insist that 1) they go into a bug tracker, and 2) that they evidence some care (such as, instead of saying, 'X is broken', include a list of steps to reproduce, and an expected outcome) then, well, you must be self serving, and feel that these bugs are not genuine or important.

But, you'll also have a greater capacity to actually deal with the requests where someone made the effort to report a bug in a useful fashion.

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MPs are supposed to serve all their consistuents, though. Open source maintainers' duty to their users is more controversial; but I think most people would agree it's not as strong as an MP's.

> then, well, you must be self serving, and feel that these bugs are not genuine or important.

It's harder to keep track of bugs that aren't on a bugtracker (hence the name) if you don't have time to fix them right now.

I regularly fix easy bugs submitted to me on IRC, but if I can't do it right now, then I require the user to open an issue on my bugtracker or else I'll forget it and fix one of the other 216 bugs on my bugtracker instead.

This is kind of like the idea that the poor person who gave their last $10 is doing more than the rich person giving $10k/month sustainably.

it's ethics vs being _effective_ in the practical reality we live in.

> MPs are supposed to serve all their consistuents, though

Yes, and that responsibility predates computers. So let’s not pretend that they only became capable of doing this effectively After Twitter was developed, just because you and others don’t want to bother with sending a letter.

OMG this! We have this over engineered issue tracking system with incredibly detailed information fields. In my opinion it has failed spectacularly because most people avoid it with a vengeance, and those who try to use it gets older much faster then the rest of us.

You missed out "create an account in the bug tracker".

I hate creating new accounts as much as the next person (maybe more), but if you can't be bothered with that much work why should I be bothered with fixing the bug? I definitely prefer bug reports in the bug tracker, even though I will still respond to those that have been emailed to me.

I'm with you generally, but this...

> if you can't be bothered with that much work why should I be bothered with fixing the bug?

comes off a bit weird. I don't fix bugs as a favor to any individual. I fix bugs because I want the product to be as good as it can be.

In my own projects, when people report bugs to me though methods other than the bug tracker, I just file the bug in the tracker myself so I don't forget.

I agree with you; I'm the same way about bugs in my products. Having said that, a bit more time/effort put into a bug report can save quite a bit of time for me in fixing this and increase the chance of success.

I report bugs as a favor to the developer. Most of the time I never plan to use the fixed software anyway.

That right there is the number one thing that might stop me from REPORTING a bug.

I also am NOT going to sign up to become a full developer just to submit a patch. Don't make me signing some CLA or other thing. Take my clear note saying the patch is submitted as (your choice of) "Too obvious to copyright", Public Domain or CC0 or some other acceptable very permissive thing.

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