How much feedback to developers?

noff · Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2003 10:26 pm Post subject: How much feedback to developers?

I was looking over at osnews and read this editorial http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3786 and I was wondering what others thought on the subject of feedback.

I tend to think I am pestering if I send a lot of feature requests. I guess it depends on the project. I think Gentoo's developers are pretty swamped so feedback needs to come with large user support. Other projects I follow like mythtv are still developing and therefore feature requests generally fall behind bugs and hardware support.

What is the proper etiquette of feature requests or minor tweaks?
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What Larry was saying is that if you make it too easy for programmers, then poor programmers will be able to do things best left to good programmers, and will inevitably do them poorly. Everyone will suffer in the long term as a result." - Tom Chance

aethyr · Veteran Joined: 06 Apr 2003 Posts: 1085 Location: NYC

submit a patch to bugzilla...

seriously, it's really not that difficult, and it's probably the easiest way to get any feature you're interested in.

aside from that, file a bug and hope it gets resolved.

and yes, chances are they're probably swamped.

nephros · Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2003 12:57 am Post subject:

Nice thing about bugzilla: it bugs the devs for you, and they can't complain about that. :twisted:

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noff · Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2003 3:35 am Post subject:

What about smaller projects? And what if you don't program. A lot of times I think that a program should change the default behavior or move some menu items around and things like that. How should that be done?
_________________
What Larry was saying is that if you make it too easy for programmers, then poor programmers will be able to do things best left to good programmers, and will inevitably do them poorly. Everyone will suffer in the long term as a result." - Tom Chance

Genone · Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2003 4:31 am Post subject:

Let me say it this way: developers aren't experts at mind-reading, so:
- you found a bug: tell them
- you have an idea for a useful feature: tell them
Of course you should check if your bug/idea already has been mentioned (bugtracker, mailing lists, faq, ...) as dupes are annoying.

User feedback is one of the best experiences for developers (unless they're completely stubborn, complaining or it's the 100th dupe of something) as it means that they've done a good job (noone would use their software if they'd done a bad job).

NoUseForAName · Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2003 11:28 am Post subject:

I would say the most important thing when submitting feature-requests is:

Don't be rude, the developer does it for fun, so you can't really expect him to do whatever you say.

But of course if you put it in a nice way, and explain why it would be useful, feature requests are mostly a good thing.

NoUseForAName · Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2003 11:29 am Post subject:

Oh, and another thing, the smaller the projects is, the more likely it is that the developer would appreciate feedback.

avenj · Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2003 10:07 pm Post subject:

I'm always looking for feedback of any sort on stuff I'm working on.

But as was noted in a previous post, it's important to avoid being rude - the best way to piss developers off is to act like you're entitled to something. I treat users with respect and expect the same in return - and when contributing or offering feedback to a project I'm not associated with, I stick to being very cuurteous and patient.