be excellent to each other (was Re: I think you meant... (was Re: london.pm.org web site - facelifted (v2)))

[Dominic Thoreau]

2008/12/14 Nicholas Clark <nick at ccl4.org>:
> **** And if I know that you contribute back it's far more likely that I'll
>     investigate your bug reports straight away, rather than putting them off.
>     For example, that's why Andy got a very full initial answer very quickly.

Mind you, some people will still ignore you.

Case in point: the previous company I was working at, someone had made
a design decision at some time in the past to use a particular library
for XML handling.

It was not a bad library, the interface for building XML was
particularly elegant - somethings that needed careful work with others
were straightforward -but as our usage of it got heavier, cracks
started to appear.
It performed badly under load, and while you could improve this, the
method was a little arcane and was passed around the dev team almost
as a secret.

Then, I found an area where it was just plain buggy.  Talking to the
Senior Dev about this he said, yes, they'd been trying to contact the
developer involved to try and fix it, with no response.  The company
involved had too much code to change libraries, too much testing and
arbitrary changes would have been needed.

I took a pragmatic approach, and submitted not only a bug report for
it, but an actual diff to fix the bug (it really was a trivial change,
but shared fixes are in the community interest).

Since that time, not only is the list of bugs in the cpan tracker
still growing (a check says 11 - some 5 years old!), but a new version
came out early this year - with that bug still in place! Said library
has an average review on 2 stars - that's 1 review of 4, and two of
one....


Bottom line: Just because you play nice, doesn't mean anyone else will
do likewise. Ignore them, continue on your own path, if you're doing
what you feel is right.
($diety help me, I'm paraphrasing Walden. Oh, that it came to this....)
-- 
No train here, but still:
The sign says: "Ready to Leave"
Normal service, yes?