Maybe "complain" is too strong, but he created a GitHub issue –notifying several hundred people– without running ag --version. Heck, he didn't even look at the output of his command. It was immediately obvious to me, from the limited information he provided, that it was a bash alias.
To the person raising the issue it's a simple mistake, sorry.
To the person that has to deal with it, it's yet another issue being raised where the reporter didn't follow the necessary steps to diagnose the problem themselves and (implicitly) expected a bunch of other people to apply their own time to solving it.
If the "New Issue" form had a place where the reporter was asked to paste the output from ag --version then it might have caught the accident before it wasted the developers' time.
I think it's an over reaction to describe the issue as a complaint, but it is an example of how the GitHub UI forces project admins to deal with incomplete and poorly investigated issues from users.
A mistake, I can understand. But each issue I linked to was not a mistake. Each one was the end result of a series of mistakes stemming from a combination of ignorance, negligence, and (occasionally) incompetence.
Have I done dumb things without realizing? Of course.[1] But in almost 20 years of software development, I have never created issues resembling the ones I linked to. Bug reports are seen by hundreds of people and take up valuable developer time, so I make sure mine are useful.
To use an analogy: Say I'm giving a talk to an audience of a hundred people. I wouldn't do it extemporaneously, without slides, then walk away in the middle of Q&A. And if I did, I wouldn't call it a mistake. I'd call it being a terrible presenter. Yet that's what bad bug reports are like:
User (notifying hundreds of people): "It doesn't work."
Dev: "What version are you using? What error messages do you see? How are you running it?"
User: * crickets *
It's gotten bad enough that I wrote a short post on how to report bugs.[2]
> Do you really want people to be afraid to report an issue in case it's something silly/not an actual problem? Would that be better?
I seriously doubt the pendulum will swing too far in the opposite direction. Right now, the majority of created issues are close to useless. If those people took five minutes of their own time to troubleshoot, it would save others hours.
True, but it's still user problems that aren't problems with the software itself. Far too often you get people who want help with _everything_ on a project, from installing the right language, their editor and so on when it's not something that really concerns you.
Maybe "complain" is too strong, but he created a GitHub issue –notifying several hundred people– without running ag --version. Heck, he didn't even look at the output of his command. It was immediately obvious to me, from the limited information he provided, that it was a bash alias.
Looks like a genuine mistake. He apologised. You've never done something dumb and didn't realise it?
I think this gets to the root of the GH problem
To the person raising the issue it's a simple mistake, sorry.
To the person that has to deal with it, it's yet another issue being raised where the reporter didn't follow the necessary steps to diagnose the problem themselves and (implicitly) expected a bunch of other people to apply their own time to solving it.
If the "New Issue" form had a place where the reporter was asked to paste the output from ag --version then it might have caught the accident before it wasted the developers' time.
I think it's an over reaction to describe the issue as a complaint, but it is an example of how the GitHub UI forces project admins to deal with incomplete and poorly investigated issues from users.
1 reply →
A mistake, I can understand. But each issue I linked to was not a mistake. Each one was the end result of a series of mistakes stemming from a combination of ignorance, negligence, and (occasionally) incompetence.
Have I done dumb things without realizing? Of course.[1] But in almost 20 years of software development, I have never created issues resembling the ones I linked to. Bug reports are seen by hundreds of people and take up valuable developer time, so I make sure mine are useful.
To use an analogy: Say I'm giving a talk to an audience of a hundred people. I wouldn't do it extemporaneously, without slides, then walk away in the middle of Q&A. And if I did, I wouldn't call it a mistake. I'd call it being a terrible presenter. Yet that's what bad bug reports are like:
User (notifying hundreds of people): "It doesn't work."
Dev: "What version are you using? What error messages do you see? How are you running it?"
User: * crickets *
It's gotten bad enough that I wrote a short post on how to report bugs.[2]
1. http://geoff.greer.fm/2015/08/15/how-to-write-good-bug-repor...
2 replies →
Do you really want people to be afraid to report an issue in case it's something silly/not an actual problem? Would that be better?
I guess it depends on the project and its contribution guidelines.
> Do you really want people to be afraid to report an issue in case it's something silly/not an actual problem? Would that be better?
I seriously doubt the pendulum will swing too far in the opposite direction. Right now, the majority of created issues are close to useless. If those people took five minutes of their own time to troubleshoot, it would save others hours.
True, but it's still user problems that aren't problems with the software itself. Far too often you get people who want help with _everything_ on a project, from installing the right language, their editor and so on when it's not something that really concerns you.