alt Hacker NewsIt sounds funny, but it's not. I once issued a bug to them that didn't have enough information about how to reproduce... and I was lambasted on Reddit and eventually just deleted my account there it was so terrifying. Some dev teams do not mess around. In fact I've shied off most social media since and no longer issue bug reports to any company, I was scarred deep over the treatment.
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That is sad, sorry to hear it.
But at the same time, sometimes you have to really persevere to get a bug fixed.
Consider the perspective of the maintainer of a popular project: to them, you're one person in a big queue of people all reporting problems. Most issues turn out to be "I need free technical support, which you don't offer, so I'll phrase it in the form of a bug", and it saps their time to look into the details of each issue to find whether it's genuine-bug or user-error.
So that's why you should try to give reproduction instructions as best you can, and be up-front if they're incomplete, or you only saw it happen once.
If the maintainer responds harshly, or even if you get commentary from others, remember they are (or should be) criticising the bug report, not you. Try not to take it personally.
And even if they decide to close it, or not investigate further, you've still done the world a favour by adding genuine details about something you saw. The bug report is still searchable when closed. Other people who get the same problem as you are likely to find it, and it might spur them to reproducing the bug where you couldn't, and re-opening or re-reporting the bug and driving it forward to completion.
How does Reddit come up in this?
The only official community spaces they maintain are:
- their GitHub projects (Issues, Pull Requests, Discussions)
- their mailing lists
- their HackerOne page
If you were harassed on Reddit that is still shitty of course, but it's not gonna be on the project's dev team:
> Some dev teams do not mess around.
Unless some of the devs have verifiable, pseudo-official presence there at least.
That surprises me -- from what I've seen, Daniel is actually remarkably tolerant of incomplete/unclear reports. (Too tolerant.) But I imagine that could depend on the day.
(Now, if you used AI to generate the report, well... that's different. Especially if you didn't disclose it up front.)
Share the issue or reddit thread.
Please ignore everyone else and do not share any more information about this experience or yourself. These people do not have your best interests in mind and will not mind, or are intending to, make this experience even worse for you.
He rubs me the wrong way, too. Curl is overhyped and a pain to work with. And he's getting high on the "success" while crying about not being paid for something he offers for free. I think Americans have a nice phrase about having cake and eating it, too.
I've read their reports before. When there's not enough information to reproduce, they do a good job of asking for more information first, and I've never seen a reasonable good-faith report elicit anything overt.
If you failed to give them proper reproduction information when asked, then yeah, you were wasting their time and they should rightfully close your issue.
I've never seen anyone on the curl team undeservedly "lambast" someone, and for a project that has a quite good reputation, I think the burden of proof is on you. Can you link to these supposedly terrifying comments?