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]
Why would you even respond to a bug report that was "it doesn't work."
Such a vague report tells you all you need to know about whether it's going to be worth your time trying to work with the person who submitted it. Close it immediately as non-actionable.
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.
All successful products will have stupid users. If you don't want to have stupid users, don't write successful software.
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...
Why would you even respond to a bug report that was "it doesn't work."
Such a vague report tells you all you need to know about whether it's going to be worth your time trying to work with the person who submitted it. Close it immediately as non-actionable.
As much as I respect you for The Silver Surfer, that 5th issue was a very silly mistake.