I Fixed a 3-year-old bug in Windows Calculator and Microsoft Couldn't Care Less! | Hacker News Reader

I Fixed a 3-year-old bug in Windows Calculator and Microsoft Couldn't Care Less!

dhikshith.medium.com

12 pointsDhikshith1221 comments

As someone who maintains a couple of open source projects and tries to welcome external contributions, I can understand your frustration but I think complaining about getting no response after less than a week is also a bit premature. Yes, we should strive to respond as soon as possible, but you never know, it might be a very busy week for the maintainers, or they might be on vacation (it's August after all), who knows. Give them some time!

Briefly glancing at the GitHub project, it has 11 open PRs and 1035 closed ones, I think those are pretty reasonable stats :)

I strongly agree. I'm not convinced this submission is on-topic.

5 days without a human response is not great but it's not _awful_. Neither of the tagged reviewers have public commits in the last week, they may (hopefully are) both on vacation and enjoying some of the summer.

I've had open-source PRs wait for a couple months before people were able to take a look, stuff happens, people have things come up and people have competing priorities.

I really want to point out the timeline here:

  - drive-by PR was opened Sunday 8/6 at 8AM PT
  - CLA was agreed to Sunday 8/6 at 8:30AM PT
  - two... maintainers? were pinged Sunday 8/6 at 11:11AM PT
  - grumpy missive about Microsoft was written Friday 8/11 and posted to HN at 10:25AM PT

4 work days without a comment on a drive-by PR seems... fine?

> Briefly glancing at the GitHub project, it has 11 open PRs and 1035 closed ones, I think those are pretty reasonable stats :)

It's crazy to me that Microsoft's extremely asinine policy of closing real issues, because they made issue closing a metric, has directly played into real organic social media positive feelings for them.

PRs, not issues. And 800 of those 1035 are merged.

This is Pull Requests, not issues. And glancing through them, the majority of the closed ones are merged, and the majority of the unmerged ones are low effort/not real, or were closed with guidance on how to resubmit them better.

I don't know actually...

Calculator is built into the Windows OS - a for-profit operating system developed by a for-profit corporation, and people expect it to work and be accurate. If there's bugs, it means it's impacting people and their calculations, and there aren't exactly any other easily accessible built-in alternatives.

It's one thing to be FOSS, but open sourcing Calc.exe doesn't really make it a real FOSS project. It's more of a novelty for Microsoft it seems.

I would expect PR's and Issues to alert a staff engineer at Microsoft who oversees public contributions. It's not like Calc is a huge project with thousands of contributors each year. Otherwise... it feels like just tossing the issue over the fence.

Please forgive me with your mighty experience, I'm young, naive, and impatient, new to the open source, and the software industry, I received a lot of criticism for this article, and I'll learn to do better and be more patient.

But if you read the article, i even begun to write the article only because i found a PR that was left unnoticed, uncommented, even by their CI system (Expected — Waiting for status to be reported) for almost a year.

It's not cool to get ghosted for a year!

Thank you : |

> It's not cool to get ghosted for a year!

And yet it's perfectly normal.

I did read your article and did look at the other PR, but to be perfectly honest it looked a bit low-effort; the justification is simply "It just makes more sense that way", and the change looks very minor. (Which, of course I don't blame the PR author because they're not obligated to do anything, but at the same time I can't blame the maintainers as much for not merging it.)

Your PR, on the other hand, looks great! The changes look well-reasoned and well-documented, though I don't know Calculator so I can't judge the code.

But, don't be discouraged, neither by the lack of response so far, nor the criticism here. Hopefully they'll merge your PR, if not, I hope you'll find some other open source project you can contribute to, or you can start your own :)

(I should've also said the positive part in my first comment, not just the negative part, apologies.)

Or it's a way to humble brag about yourself - hey! Look at me! I submitted a fix for Microsoft's calculator! Why haven't they accepted it yet?!

Yes, you are absolutely right, but it's not humble bragging, it's real bragging, If i'm doing open-source, that too for a for-profit company, i want the bragging rights.

> If you’re also getting ghosted by some Open source project, I just wanna advise you, get a life! (even to myself as I’m writing this article) and build something real and put a price on it, your time is not free, and neither is the time of the users, and you’ll really understand if your work is really valued in the free markets. > That’s why I’m building Folksable: A Home for Internet Hustlers.

Is this article satire? What is happening.

>This kind of grew on me from when I was 17, then I was a believer in socialism (as it’s still largely prevalent in my country in India), but adulting teaches a lot of things, and appreciating capitalism is one of those things is what I felt.

It's either satire or a complete lack of any self reflection ability

lol

Microsoft doesn’t care as it doesn’t affect business goals but I think Microsoft employees do appreciate your open source efforts. Imagine how many thousands of repos they will have and unless improving calculator becomes a goal for windows then they will be busy on other features that have more business critical bugs.

At least that’s how I imagine it works over there.

Before I put any effort into an Open Source contribution, I always check the water first:

  - Does the project have stale PRs?
  - Do they react to small fixes? (typos, broken links)

Do they have thousands of open issues? (I'm sitting myself on a VLC bug which I can't be arsed to report)

I'm pretty sure that's not a typo or a small fix, many people use scientific mode and type negative exponents and it gives this "2.6exp-2 == 0.6", it concerned me, so i tried to fix it, and opened a pr.

I agree with you.

The point I'm making is: Before I put any real effort into a fix, I test if they are receptible to something that was easy for me to make, and should be easy for them to validate, e.g. a typo fix.

Because what you often find out is that people are not interested in being active maintainers.

It's been a loong time since M$ cared about user experience at all.

"That doesn't matter!" https://youtu.be/UFcb-XF1RPQ?t=140

Reply on news.ycombinator.com