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Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

Toxic maintainer. Kovid Goyal is known to be abrasive. I'm looking for good examples. But maybe I've just seen the other end of the arguments and he's okay?

I'm guessing the best bits are hidden here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/

Like eg this one: https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/853934

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Wow, you were not exaggerating. From comment #11 of that bug report [1]:

(...) You are not doing us a favor by reporting a bug. On the contrary, you are asking us to do you a favor and spend our valuable time helping overcome a problem _you_ are having. (...)

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/853934/comments/11

Now that you mention it, my one bug report was met with a frosty reception.

Edit: thanks for posting that bug report. I was quite excited about contributing to Calibre at the time of filing my bug report, but got such a negative reaction that the thought vanished. How many other missed opportunities have there been, maybe a fork would bring them back?

And of course the infamous "calibre-mount-helper" fiasco: http://lwn.net/Articles/465311/

Wow he doesn't have to try to be infamous.

wow, very eye opening. What an arrogant douche.

Anyway, I still rely on Calibre to manage my ebooks, and have donated a couple of times. Despite the messy and confusing UI, it's the only ebook manager I found that does what I need (Kindle sync, multiple layers of tags and categorization, download metadata).

I remember reporting a bug, a few years ago, though I can't find it now. It was about the weird glitches in the green icons next to the search bar in the toolbar.

These: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9umwphlisjy4uzd/Screenshot%202014-...

I included screenshots at the time. I got brushed off with a "this doesn't happen for me, it's probably your system being messed up" and my bug closed as invalid.

It's still there, across several different OS reinstalls. For that matter, it's still there in recent screenshots from other people: http://www.snapfiles.com/screenfiles/calibre.png

So maybe it's intentional? It seems too ugly for that, but...

Yeah, happens for me too but I never noticed until now. I guess I just always thought that this was the way it was designed to look. The UI is more than a little bit jumbled/ugly.

I could see where the intention might come from. The buttons relate to search functionality, and there's binoculars in the background.

But then... they don't line up. If it was intentional, I'd expect them to be on the same level.

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