<story><title>The open source paradox</title><url>http://antirez.com/news/134</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mjw1007</author><text>When I file a bug report, I often feel I would like to add a disclaimer, along the lines of:&lt;p&gt;« I&amp;#x27;m filing this bug report because I found a bug. This isn&amp;#x27;t a complaint that the bug exists, or a suggestion that you prioritise fixing it, or a support request asking for workarounds. It&amp;#x27;s just a report that the bug exists. »&lt;p&gt;But I think actually writing that would come over as rather snotty. Maybe the right thing is to write a post somewhere on what I think is the right attitude for filing bug reports, and discreetly link to it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>FartyMcFarter</author><text>Is this really necessary?&lt;p&gt;If I post a bug report like &amp;quot;when I run command X, there&amp;#x27;s a crash&amp;quot;, how many OSS authors get annoyed?&lt;p&gt;If anyone gets annoyed at that, this is a sign they need to take a break from the project (or from the bug database), not a sign that the bug reporter needs to do anything differently.</text></comment>
<story><title>The open source paradox</title><url>http://antirez.com/news/134</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mjw1007</author><text>When I file a bug report, I often feel I would like to add a disclaimer, along the lines of:&lt;p&gt;« I&amp;#x27;m filing this bug report because I found a bug. This isn&amp;#x27;t a complaint that the bug exists, or a suggestion that you prioritise fixing it, or a support request asking for workarounds. It&amp;#x27;s just a report that the bug exists. »&lt;p&gt;But I think actually writing that would come over as rather snotty. Maybe the right thing is to write a post somewhere on what I think is the right attitude for filing bug reports, and discreetly link to it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>franciscop</author><text>As an open source maintainer, and from what I&amp;#x27;ve seen in general, there&amp;#x27;s absolutely no problem with reporting a bug! Do you mind me asking why you feel like adding that disclaimer? Is it because you don&amp;#x27;t want to seem demanding? What is the goal of &amp;quot;just report that the bug exists&amp;quot;?&lt;p&gt;The main&amp;#x2F;only major problem I&amp;#x27;ve seen with bug reports is when it&amp;#x27;s actually user code, so if you can show why you are certain that it&amp;#x27;s the library&amp;#x27;s code that is buggy that&amp;#x27;s best. If you can prove it with a code snippet, perfect. If you can point to a specific place of code and explain why it doesn&amp;#x27;t work, perfect. Or just explain exactly what happened. TBH, as long as you are just not be like &amp;quot;my code doesn&amp;#x27;t work fix it&amp;quot; you should be mostly fine.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Note: exception if the package is marked as e.g. &amp;quot;unmaintained&amp;quot; or such&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Note: there might be some truly awful OSS maintainers, and some are infamous for it (e.g. Linus); but in my experience it&amp;#x27;s very very rare to find a negative reaction to a helpful PR.</text></comment>