Hi,
An Apple developer recently contacted me directly about the Wine64 radar (number 9269783). What's interesting about his response, however, is that he put in an aside to berate us for our etiquette. I am convinced that at least this developer sees us as rude, hateful creatures now, and he cited a particular bug (29922) that he filed and even offered to fix as an example. Gee, I wonder why that might be? (Hint: Look at the "To:" field.)
In your defense, I realize that Vitaliy's behavior is not representative of Wine developers as a whole, and that Jeremy's behavior wasn't exactly golden, either. I also realize that there really is no build breakage resulting from the bug, because we don't include any Objective-C headers. He was convinced that there could have been breakage, however. You--AJ, I'm talking to you in particular--did not adequately explain to him why this didn't break the build. Instead, you--Vitaliy in particular--practically yelled at him--for trying to help! By this point, he's likely told his colleagues at Apple about his experience. With guys like Vitaliy developing Wine, is it any wonder Apple doesn't want to help? Are we, the developers, the real reason Apple isn't contributing? For that matter, are we the real reason more people *in general* aren't contributing?
At the very least, we should be more welcoming of help, even from Apple. We need it. Maybe not to fix trivial non-bugs like 29922, but to make Wine a better alternative to Windows--on Mac, Linux, or anywhere. But as long as people like Vitaliy are yelling at potential contributors, we won't get much help beyond what we've got at CodeWeavers.
Just my two bits.
Chip
On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 4:33 AM, Charles Davis cdavis@mymail.mines.eduwrote:
Hi,
An Apple developer recently contacted me directly about the Wine64 radar (number 9269783). What's interesting about his response, however, is that he put in an aside to berate us for our etiquette. I am convinced that at least this developer sees us as rude, hateful creatures now, and he cited a particular bug (29922) that he filed and even offered to fix as an example. Gee, I wonder why that might be? (Hint: Look at the "To:" field.)
In your defense, I realize that Vitaliy's behavior is not representative of Wine developers as a whole, and that Jeremy's behavior wasn't exactly golden, either. I also realize that there really is no build breakage resulting from the bug, because we don't include any Objective-C headers. He was convinced that there could have been breakage, however. You--AJ, I'm talking to you in particular--did not adequately explain to him why this didn't break the build. Instead, you--Vitaliy in particular--practically yelled at him--for trying to help! By this point, he's likely told his colleagues at Apple about his experience. With guys like Vitaliy developing Wine, is it any wonder Apple doesn't want to help? Are we, the developers, the real reason Apple isn't contributing? For that matter, are we the real reason more people *in general* aren't contributing?
At the very least, we should be more welcoming of help, even from Apple. We need it. Maybe not to fix trivial non-bugs like 29922, but to make Wine a better alternative to Windows--on Mac, Linux, or anywhere. But as long as people like Vitaliy are yelling at potential contributors, we won't get much help beyond what we've got at CodeWeavers.
Just my two bits.
Chip
There are a thousand bugs where I would agree with you, but Jeremy's second post was "I don't plan on submitting patches to you frequently enough to make it worth my time to read your policies and subscribe to your lists.". That's not "trying to help", it's self-entitled behaviour.
I do think there is unnecessary rudeness floating around bugzilla in general though. It sometimes feel like some people's motto is to close as many bugs invalid as they can, without even giving the user a chance to explain themselves better. I've especially seen some non-native English speakers filing very weird bugs and being yelled at "read this massive rules page" when they could barely understand five words. Now I realise some people's time is limited, unpaid, etc. But that's just it -- no one (to my knowledge) is forced to take care of those users. I'm personally doing bugzilla maintenance because it's fun for me to see a project evolve; if I see an user that annoys me personally, I just leave it and I know someone else (eg. Austin) will take care of them... if not, silence is better than rudeness.
J. Leclanche
While I'm inclined to agree on the general point that some of the replies on bugzilla aren't the most tactful or effective way to get a point across, I don't think it has a whole lot to do with Apple helping Wine or not. I know that at CodeWeavers we've filed a fair amount of bugs in the Apple bug tracker, often with detailed descriptions and test cases to reproduce them. Most of the time those just get (very politely, true) ignored. My impression is that the reasons are mostly political, but that's of course something that's hard to substantiate.
First of all that me address your subject: I really doubt Apple will ever help Wine, regardless what happens on our bugzilla. Apple have pretty specific predisposition to open source and they sure won't change it because of one unsuccessful bug report.
On 03/10/2012 09:33 PM, Charles Davis wrote:
In your defense, I realize that Vitaliy's behavior is not representative of Wine developers as a whole, and that Jeremy's behavior wasn't exactly golden, either. I also realize that there really is no build breakage resulting from the bug, because we don't include any Objective-C headers. He was convinced that there could have been breakage, however. You--AJ, I'm talking to you in particular--did not adequately explain to him why this didn't break the build. Instead, you--Vitaliy in particular--practically yelled at him--for trying to help! By this point, he's likely told his colleagues at Apple about his experience. With guys like Vitaliy developing Wine, is it any wonder Apple doesn't want to help? Are we, the developers, the real reason Apple isn't contributing? For that matter, are we the real reason more people *in general* aren't contributing?
Can you show me exactly where did I yell at him? Or where I wasn't polite enough in explaining that his behavior on _our_ bugzilla is not appropriate and he either sticks to it, or don't report bugs to us anymore?
When everyone, including AJ telling the person "what you reporting is not an error from our POV, unless you can come up with a broken application, a test program/code, or any other proof on a contrary we deem such bugs invalid." This was the rule of our bugzilla for years. I hope this does not require yet another explanation why.
And one last thing, all I did is to stop an endless reopening of that bug. If you think there is/was another way to make Jeremy understand why that bug was invalid lets hear it.
Vitaliy.
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Charles Davis -
Henri Verbeet -
Jerome Leclanche -
Vitaliy Margolen