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Comment by Symbiote | Hacker News Reader

> I think dropping all this feedback in one place is probably better for triage than me opening lots of individual bugs

You presumably know better than this. The standard, decades-old advice for submitting issues and bug reports is the opposite -- one problem per issue submission, so discussion and triaging individual issues is possible.

With most community-supported open source projects, casual drive-by braindumps are likely to be ignored. Reduce the friction to the developer as much as possible.

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There comes a point when so much is broken or in need of changes, especially when most of it’s essentially in one area (in this case, the win32 GTK theme it’s using) that that traditional wisdom (which I normally follow) ceases to be true. I know that were I developing on such a thing I would genuinely prefer one big report to begin with than a large number of tiny bug reports. I might or might not then split it up, depending on how much effort things would be. In this case, I think that most of the issues could be fixed (or mitigated) by one person modifying the theme stylesheet, fairly quickly. Then there are some things that I simply don’t know whether they’re the same underlying thing or not, and splitting them out if they’re the same root cause is a nuisance when you’re a developer—you just end up needing to coalesce them again.

Considering that the small group of developers are all volunteers, I think you owe it to them to write your bug report in a way that is actually usable by them. One way would be creating one bigger issue with your suspected root cause (the win32 GTK theme) and a long, enumerated list of the specific issues, their reproduction, etc. (including screenshots). Ideally, each item on the list links to a new issue that follows the standard model for bug reports. Reacting as strongly as you did in the issue thread will definitely not get anything fixed.

Please consider the human and, here, the limited resources of the developers.

> There comes a point when so much is broken or in need of changes, especially when most of it’s essentially in one area (in this case, the win32 GTK theme it’s using) that that traditional wisdom (which I normally follow) ceases to be true.

I think it's even more true for cognitive behavioural reasons. A volunteer-driven project in particularly works best with small, easily digestible problems that can be individually doled out to (or accepted by) people with limited time. It's beneficial because it shows progress to participants and issue submitters.

I just read the second report, both the rambling source and your irredeemably rude response to the volunteer developer who chose to respond to your nonsense. You should be ashamed of yourself.

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