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Comment by franciscop | Hacker News Reader

I have few projects on 1k+ stars; the ones that are more beginner-friendly are normally where I get most unrelated requests. I used to help people where possible, but now I just don't have the time (or TBH, motivation).

So I closed the issues on those two projects that got most low-quality issues. People started to open PR to tell me I was wrong and I should open the issues. This cemented my decision, oh the entitlement of some people.

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> People started to open PR to tell me I was wrong and I should open the issues.

Did those pull requests have code changes?

I don't know Francisco but I'm sure he deserves better than this

https://github.com/franciscop/picnic/pull/203/files

+If you spot a bug or any other issue you may go to hell because this software is officially Bug Free(TM). +

If you see somebody behaving like that, report them to GitHub so they don't do it to anybody else. The link is on their user profile page.

I did, no response so far.

I think that's understandable. You closed issues for bugs you didn't resolve.

Maybe you know the OP, but in my experience a lot of issues are not bug reports but very low quality, uninformed or unreasonable requests or questions. Like questions made about basic functionality that is answered in the documentation/faq, or requests for features that are completely outside the scope of the project. Another popular category is requests for basic education e.g. “how does DQN work?”. That’s fine if it’s one person but when it’s 100 it gets overwhelming.

Sure. On the other hand, sometimes people put a lot of time and effort into isolating an issue and writing up the best description they can manage. Closing the issue is a one-click FU to the people who are doing their best to help.

Some users are overly entitled, but some maintainers are self-absorbed douchebags. I've seen both sides.

I will never understand this point of view. The author has already given you possibly hundreds of hours of free labor simply by publishing the project. But now, because they won’t give you a few more, they’re a douchebag?

Even if they close all issues with no comment, they have given you a such _massive_ head start vs having to write the entire project yourself from scratch. How can you be anything but grateful?

It's just that if you put lot of effort into isolating a bug for someone for free, it can feels bad to have it rejected without explanation.

Also if it's a real issue that you won't fix you should at least leave the issue open so other people know.

IMO you can definitely be extremely grateful for someone's contribution and also think they are sort of rude, not incompatible views/feeling.

> It's just that if you put lot of effort into isolating a bug for someone for free, it can feels bad to have it rejected without explanation.

Where does that bad feeling come from? Does it come from the fact that you feel like you're owed a response? Do you get the same feeling when you email strangers and they don't respond?

> Also if it's a real issue that you won't fix you should at least leave the issue open so other people know.

> IMO you can definitely be extremely grateful for someone's contribution and also think they are sort of rude, not incompatible views/feeling.

You're not entitled to gratitude. Assuming that people should & will run their own projects according to your values around courtesy is a little self-centred.

If you need the bug fixing and the maintainer isn't doing it fast enough, just fork it. This is the point of open source.

> Where does that bad feeling come from? Does it come from the fact that you feel like you're owed a response? Do you get the same feeling when you email strangers and they don't respond?

It's just the time spent for me, I mean if for some reason I put like an hour of my time composing an email to a stranger and they didn't respond I would unhappy. It would be my fault but I would still be unhappy.

I agree that no one is entitled to have everyone act nice to them. I just think it's nice to tell someone why you're closing their issue.

> If you need the bug fixing and the maintainer isn't doing it fast enough, just fork it. This is the point of open source.

100%

I can understand this. I think once I realised that there was significant value to me in putting the bug report together in the first place, I felt happier if it just got closed or ignored.

There's something about putting time and effort into writhing a good bug report that forces you to truly try and understand what's happening.

> ...isolating a bug for someone...

I think you mistakenly switched the roles there. You are not isolating a bug for the author. The author is using their software and is happy with its current state. It is you that is being hit by a supposed bug, and you are isolating it for yourself. Then you are expecting the author to do the additional work for you and handle your supposed fixes. Don’t get me wrong, you’re probably both helping each other in the best spirit of open source, but it’s not you who’s the ideal of generosity there.

This a thousand times. If you hit a bug on my code and put together a PR to fix it, the reasons I would merge it are in order of importance:

1. For you, since you are nice and helpful debugging it and fixing it for you and others so I want to make it easy for you to use the working code.

2. For other users that might hit the bug, for every PR bugfix there are likely N people hitting the bug.

3. For me in case I hit it in the future.

4. For correctness sake.

But not all bugs are straightforward, many have side-effects or disadvantages that I might not be comfortable merging straight away. So I have to evaluate how long it'll take me to review the PR and whether it's even worth-it (the vast majority of times PRs are worth-it, but issues are a hit and miss).

If they have it open for issues and then handle the responses they have invited poorly, then yes, that's rude. A douchebag doesn't magically stop being a douchebag because they've open-sourced some code.

fair, I actually didn’t know you could disable issues.

Alas you /still/ can’t disable pull requests, even when a Github mirror is completely the wrong place to submit patches.

I've given thousands of hours on my open source, but just because it's the way I code. Any personal project where I create a small self-contained abstract unit, I'll put that as open source. Most of this code (by, say lines) is provided "as-is" with no much expectations. Those where I think they solve a real gap in the ecosystem I'll put more effort into writing good documentation.

Exactly this. Bug reports were very welcome! While I stated that the API would not expand any longer in some projects, I also considered coherent feature requests a positive, and normally suggested and guided those as a plugin that lives within their codebase.

The problem was when people came like "I am using this library, can you debug my code?" and pasted a 500-liner, or like "this doesn't work on my XYZ system, fix it", or when they were just rude or demanding.

I've met some wonderful people BTW, and would also not trade that for anything.

I've done this after scouring the documentation and being unable to find an answer. When there isn't a newsgroup or email list setup it's often really the only way to get in touch with a developer or maintainer. Suboptimal for sure, but if a library seems like it may solve your problem, it's worth a shot.