Thursday, November 7, 2019

They Might Never Tell You It’s Broken

Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert:

The more important lesson, that I didn’t understand until that point, is that you can’t count on the people trying your project to quickly and reliably signal bugs to you. Most of the time, if it doesn’t work, they won’t report the problem.

[…]

It’s a horrifying thought, but it could be that for every one person who opens an issue on GitHub, 100 or more people have already tried your project, run into that same bug, and simply moved on. So, what can you do? You can encourage people to report bugs.

Previously:

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I've given up reporting bugs. To Apple, for obvious reasons, they just don't care. But even for projects on Github, it's been my experience that 90% of the time I'll open an issue, fully explain and document what's happening, and the developer will never respond. To me it's just disrespectful of my time when I make the effort to document a bug and it just seems to go into a black hole. I've got better things to do with my time.

On the other hand, when developers of apps do respond and fix the issue, I almost always make a donation to them if possible (by buying the paid version if it's shareware, or just PayPal'ing them $10, etc)

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