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Comment by inerte | Hacker News Reader

If you're going to fix the bug, why not in the main project?

Any time I have tried to fix a bug in an open source project I was immediately struck down with abusive attitudes about how I didn't do something exactly the way they wanted it that isn't really documented.

If that's what I have to expect, I'd rather not even interact with them at all.

If you really care, I would suggest helping with documenting how the process should work for others to reference going forward.

I would if people were not abusive to me in the first place, but that attitude just turns me off to the entire project.

I don't think this is what typically happens. Many of my bug reports were handled.

For instance, I reported to the xorg-bug tracker that one app behaved oddly when I did --version on it. I was batch-reporting all xorg-applications via a ruby script.

Alan Coopersmith, the elderly hero that he is, fixed this not long after my report. (It was a real bug; granted, a super-small one, but still.)

I could give many more examples here. (I don't remember the exact date but I think I reported this within the last 3 years or so. Unfortunately reporting bugs in xorg-apps is ... a bit archaic. I also stopped reporting bugs to KDE because I hate bugzilla. Github issues spoiled me, they are so easy and convenient to use.)

I feel you, and that's a different issue than the one in this thread, which is in general if maintainers ignore bug reports, their projects will be forked and the issue fixed anyway but not in the main project.

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