Oh forget it.

I have a pet peeve with a great deal of the OSS developers out there. Now, this doesn't include all of them -- some of them behave considerably better than others -- but I have had the misfortune to stumble upon far too many that anger me to the point of not wanting anything to do with Open Source projects that it isn't funny any more.

My pet peeve is with bug reporting. Most OSS projects have a bug tracker and in theory they encourage users to post bugs so that they can be tracked down and fixed. IN THEORY.

The problem is, in an absurd amount of projects, if you actually take the time to write a bug report that isn't a duplicate, and describe the problem as best as you can, some developer will come along and dismiss you as an effing moron.

Let's say that I notice that the latest version of one of my favourite applications has this slight bug where when I do one thing, like maximise the window, my cpu usage will skyrocket. Now, this doesn't happen when the application is minimised, and it didn't happen with the previous version, and it also doesn't happen with some different window configurations.

Now, being a responsible OSS application user, I will report this odd behaviour to the application's bug report, thinking, oh, this must be a new bug in the application I'm using, because it doesn't happen with any other application, any other VERSION of this one application, or with some other configurations of my system. Since this behaviour is NEW, and the only thing I have changed is my APPLICATION, it MUST be the application's fault -- goes the logic.

With the bug reported, all should be well right? The developer should look at my bug and ask me questions or try to duplicate it or other things, right?! NO! What do I get?! I get the developer telling me that it's NOT the application's fault, it must be my window configuration. That's right, even though if the developer had actually READ my bug report, they would know that THIS BUG DIDN'T HAPPEN UNTIL THE NEW RELEASE WITH THE SAME CONFIGURATION. BUT DO THEY READ THAT PART?! NO! THEY TELL ME THE BUG IS INVALID AND CLOSE IT, REFUSING TO HEAR THAT THEY MAY BE CAUSING USERS OF THEIR APPLICATION ISSUES!

WTF.

Why the hell do they even have a bug tracker then? Why not just say to all their users, "everything is someone else's fault, not this application, so go complain to them."

Look, if you don't want users filing bug reports, DON'T ASK THEM TO. If you don't want to hear a goddamned word that someone may be trying to tell you about your new code base, DON'T ASK FOR IT.

I am absolutely sick of this mentality.

Want to know why people don't bother posting effing bug reports? That's pretty simple: YOU DON'T LISTEN TO A DAMN WORD THEY SAY!

Honestly, I'd rather spend my time finding an alternate application than post bug reports any more, it's just not worth my time to be told that kind of garbage*.

(*see rant on gaim/pidgin for yet ANOTHER example of bug reporting / developer idiocy.)