Are we the reason Apple isn't helping us?

[Jerome Leclanche]

On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 4:33 AM, Charles Davis <cdavis at mymail.mines.edu>wrote:

> 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
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