[OT] D's community is awesome!

[Robert Clipsham]

On 10/06/2011 07:27, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> Seriously. You have a problem with something D-related? D-people are
> helpful, friendly and articulate.

For the most part, there'll always be people in the community who 
aren't. Just like every community gets a troll or two.

> By contrast, I once again tried to get TortoiseHg/hg-git working with
> github. TortoiseHg's homepage has a big prominent "download latest installer
> for your OS" button (but worded better than that ;) ). It includes hg-git,
> mercurial, dulwich, all the requirements built right in with a nice
> installer. Great, right? Except a simple "clone from github, modify, commit,
> push" didn't work (just like it never did before). This time it was a little
> bit different, though. Something about not being "head", and something else
> about bookmarks. Blah, blah, etc.
>
> That's all fine, of course. I can understand bugs getting in now and then,
> and even taking a little while to get sorted out, especially on a big major
> OSS project. So I filed a bug report.
>
> Now here's where the D world really shines: If this had been within the D
> sphere of influence, the response would most likely have been helpful,
> meaningful, friendly, you know, *good*. But with this, the response I got
> was three lower-cased, non-punctuated words: "update your extensions"
> ...WTF? Yea, way to be helpful. Thanks for nothing. At least it wasn't
> "RTFM" - whoever coinded that one seriously needs to be shot.

I find the people that tend to give these responses are people that are 
used to dealing with bug reports from users rather than developers - 
after a while you begin to drop the pleasantries because you're so used 
to giving a standard response which sorts it most of the time. Of 
course, this rather defeats the point of a bug tracker in my opinion.

> But from my (admittedly still limited) experience, that sort of thing seems
> to be typical of places like BitBucket and Launchpad (I've had worse on
> Launchpad before, regarding Ubuntu: Ubuntu has a long-standing tradition of
> screwing up the screen resolution if you boot with your monitor off. But
> instead of doing anything sensible about it, like, say, marking it as
> Triaged at Low Priority and accepting that the problem even exists, it works
> like this: You post on the existing open report for it, and they scold you
> for using custom drivers. You point out that you get the same problem
> *without* using the custom drivers, and they insist you need to open a new
> report "because your configuration is different than the OP". Ok, but
> there's about ten other reports (from other people who also had a different
> configuration) that did *exactly that*, which were promptly closed for being
> duplicates. WTF?!?)

It's unfortunate you've encountered such responses - I've not had a bad 
experience with any bitbucket project, launchpad was slightly different, 
but it was nothing terrible. With the github decentralized model I think 
it makes it even less likely, there's a far stronger community thanks to 
the way it encourages everyone to be able to work on a project at once, 
even if you aren't part of a core team. Sure, it's possible on 
launchpad/bitbucket, it doesn't seem to be as actively encouraged though.

> Anyway, I don't actually care about this issue anymore, and I'm not posting
> here looking for help on it. I dislike Git/TortoiseGit, but at least I can
> get by with them, whereas I've pretty much concluded at this point that
> hg-git just isn't worth bothering with.

You're probably better off for it - I used to be strongly in the 
mercurial camp, but having used git for a while I find I vastly prefer 
it, despite still not knowing how to do quite a bit with it.

> But the point is, I really appreciate how awesome the D community is
> compared to so many others.

/* I can't speak for everyone */
nick ~= (1/communities["D"].length) * thanks;

PS Sorry if this doesn't read well, I replied from bottom to top :S
-- 
Robert
http://octarineparrot.com/