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Comment by Uehreka | Hacker News Reader

I’m not submitting a patch to something if I don’t know what it is.

We have a saying for that too involving reading the manual.

The amount of times I've been told "Read the manual" and then the link to the manual was down, or the manual was out of date, or the manual was so disorganized I couldn't find what I was looking for far outnumbers the times a manual was useful.

My guess is people who angrily retort "rtfm" are not the best at actually writing manuals.

That is your sign to figure out the answer and fix the manual. This is often the most needed contribution. If you do well your feature requests are get priority as you are an active contributor.

Ooh, I got this one:

> The amount of times I've been told "Read the manual" and then the link to the manual was down,

Patches accepted for fixing links so you can read the fucking manual.

> or the manual was out of date,

This is deb-old-doc list, the mailing list for archiving vintage manuals. To discuss out-of-date manuals in current versions of Debian you must subscribe to deb-doc-old

> or the manual was so disorganized I couldn't find what I was looking for far outnumbers the times a manual was useful.

Did you file a bug report?

> My guess is people who angrily retort "rtfm" are not the best at actually writing manuals.

It's possible. On the other hand: you don't exist. Go away.

How'd I do? :)

`man man`

Just don't make the mustake of googling that and clicking the first link while at work. One of those times i'm glad for a restrictive firewall.

LOL my mind didn’t even go there, but now that you’ve said it, not sure how it didn’t

Investing dozens of hours into learning something deeply enough to be able to modify it is a bit silly when someone who already knows what they are doing could probably do the same thing in half an hour.

It is only silly if you're willing to pay someone who already knows what they are doing to do it.

Are you willing to pay? No? Are you willing to do the work? No? Then you're just being an annoyance.

You aren't entitled to anyone else's effort. No matter how little effort you think it will be. (Hint, your estimates are almost certainly off, generally by orders of magnitude.)

How hard is it to say "that's not going to work" or "maybe one day" or "that's a good idea". If it's something open and collaborative, maybe someone will see the idea and be willing to implement it. Also, on a separate note, why are you so aggressive and belittling?

FWIW the belittling part is assuming you're entitled to someone else's half an hour.

Personally, I welcome feature requests and bug reports as long as effort is put into communicating them properly. I thank the reporter, give them pointers, and encourage other people to contribute the feature/fix. If I have time I fix it myself.

But if you act like I work for you in the report, you'll get the same measure of respect in return.

Tangentially, the time you spend learning the project will make you a better contributor. You'll be able to contribute more quickly next time. Now the project has two people that can implement the requested change in 30 minutes.

Please put in that time for projects you care about and help maintain them.

The problem is that when the dev says "that's not going to work", then it is likely that the dev has just opened the door for an argument with a user who refuses to see that it won't and will try to argue for it at length. It doesn't take many of those to take all of the fun out of open source development, and have devs walk away from the project. I've seen it happen plenty of times. I've had it happen to me. It really is a soul-sucking distraction.

As for your claim that I'm being belittling, I'm really not. I'm just telling you how this works in the real world.

The one who is being belittling here is you, with your assumption that someone else should do what you want because they have developed skills and expertise that you haven't. But nobody else owes you their time and energy. You can pay them in money, you can pay them in showing such courtesy so that they want to do it, or you can pay by spending the effort to learn to do the work yourself. Assuming you can get it for free because you throw around words like "silly" is you dismissing the rights of others as unimportant. All that I'm doing is pointing that fact out to you.

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