And there, I think, is the rub. So many open source projects see bug reports as something of a zero sum game, where simply mentioning that something isn't working quite right is seen as being a sponge.
I think that's a sad culture, but I go along with it. Hence the policy of not even bothering to report bugs I'm not prepared to fix. The reason that's sad is that it creates a culture where, as the author of TFA describes, critical bugs that severely hinder the project's popularity by rendering it unusable to many users might go undetected by the project's maintainer(s) for a very long time. Because it creates a situation where potentially every single person who encounters the bug will decide that the path of least resistance is to quietly go find something else to do without bothering to mention that there's a problem.
It's almost like a sort of cultural prisoner's dilemma. If we're all charitable and try to give each other the benefit of the doubt, we'd probably collectively be a lot happier and more productive. But the presence of a significant subset of people who take a more stand-offish attitude means that everyone's optimal strategy is to be a little bit stand-offish, for better or for worse.
I think that's a sad culture, but I go along with it. Hence the policy of not even bothering to report bugs I'm not prepared to fix. The reason that's sad is that it creates a culture where, as the author of TFA describes, critical bugs that severely hinder the project's popularity by rendering it unusable to many users might go undetected by the project's maintainer(s) for a very long time. Because it creates a situation where potentially every single person who encounters the bug will decide that the path of least resistance is to quietly go find something else to do without bothering to mention that there's a problem.
It's almost like a sort of cultural prisoner's dilemma. If we're all charitable and try to give each other the benefit of the doubt, we'd probably collectively be a lot happier and more productive. But the presence of a significant subset of people who take a more stand-offish attitude means that everyone's optimal strategy is to be a little bit stand-offish, for better or for worse.