Want it? Give. (Plea to Rails Developers)

I respect what Ryan's trying to do here, and understand the frustration that is almost unavoidable when working on a community-driven open source project with a large number of users.<p>But at the same time, I'm frustrated. I've found bugs, worked around them, written up an incredibly detailed description of one. I wrote a patch, wrote tests for the patch, and mentioned that I was a first-time contributor and wanted to do it right. After a few positive comments, a member of Rails core came along, made a dismissive comment, and left.<p>If you're going to write blog posts calling community members "useless, pathetic bastards", you darn well better make sure that the community is one that welcomes patches, encourages positive discussion, and if the patches or contributions are inappropriate/applied at the wrong level of abstraction - work to get it there.<p>Otherwise, you'll end up with a community of users that maintain their own local patches, forking the core or components of it because the mental overhead of sponsoring a patch and pushing it through takes weeks, while just Getting it Done is a couple lines of code and push to your repo. Which is (sadly), kind of where I'm at.<p>I love Rails. I like many of the principles it rests on, and I love the flexibility it offers. I've learned at least half of what I know about software development and engineering while programming Ruby. But when it comes to dropping writing elegant code so that I can spend hours hammering through endless gut-wrenching arguments on a Lighthouse ticket - count me out.

In general when an open source project is failing at something, the maintainer is failing at something.<p>A maintainer has a lot of power over the project he maintains, but this power comes at the price that you have to make sure the boring stuff gets done: That bugs get triaged and fixed, that releases get released, that patches get reviewed and applied. If no one else is doing these things, then <i>you</i> need to be doing them. You should not be writing new features while complaining that no one is helping you with the boring stuff. If you do that, then people are entirely justified in whining and complaining about you and your project. Eventually, they will fork or rewrite it or move on to other projects, and rightly so.<p>Only once you are fixing the bugs yourself do you get to tell people to help out when they ask about bugs or when the next release comes out, or when their new feature patch will be reviewed. Sorry, open source maintainers. You don't get to spend all your time pretending you are Linus Torvalds. You have to actually do work.<p>I know almost nothing about Ruby on Rails, so maybe the above doesn't apply to it, but if there are 900 tickets blocking the next release, then at the very least, they likely failed at triaging.

Software is routinely released with dozens, hundreds or thousands of known bugs. That said, although I'm sympathetic to Ryan's request, the '900 bugs' figure is pretty seriously off.<p>Lots of these bugs aren't assigned to any milestone. Many of the bugs that are are assigned to 2.x. In fact: if you go look at the 3.0 milestone, there are only 61 active tickets in there (<a href="https://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994-ruby-on-rails/milestones/27004-rails-3" rel="nofollow">https://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994-ruby-on-rails/...</a>)<p>Should some of the 2.x milestone bugs be fixed for 3.0? Probably. I dunno. I have no idea what the Rails team's triage process is like.<p>A bunch of the bugs in Ryan's query are marked 'incomplete'. Here's one that Ryan even said <i>should be closed:</i> <a href="https://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994/tickets/1160-scoped-models-serialize-into-invalid-xml" rel="nofollow">https://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994/tickets/1160-s...</a><p>It'd be great to see a call to arms like this also include links to relevant information on contributing to Rails, in order to focus the inevitable nerd outcry in a positive direction ;)

&#62; Do you know of a project like this?<p>Yes. Nearly every open source project. It is hard to make contributing effortless in self-organized communities.

The only people to be upset at are the people that find a bug, have the capacity to fix it, but don't, and complain instead.<p>Other than that, please stop yelling at me ;) Welcome to OSS. In the time you took to write that rant, you could have probably resolved a bug or three.<p>Personally, the framework usually works fine for me. When it doesn't, and I find a bug, I'll fix it. Done. That's a nice and natural workflow of OSS.<p>When I'm not working, I'm spending time with my children and my family. I find a lot more happiness in that than I would fixing other peoples bugs.<p>I recommend finding happiness in the environment you're working with, and not chastising an OSS community because there are easily fixable open bugs in the system.<p>Maybe it's the wine talking, but man, that was a negative read to me. Back to dessert, and maybe I'll run into a bug and fix it later (on my free time even!). On a side note, I also love nerding ou on those bug smashing parties. It's social, fun, and not required :)

1) Please don't swear, it makes you look like an angry teenager and it doesn't help your message. 2) The fact that Rails has 900 bugs is appalling, but don't blame it on the community, blame it on the team working on it 3) The Rails core team is working on it because they wanted to scratch an itch, who are you to tell me what itch I should be scratching? 4) I'm getting tired of the arrogance displayed by Rails people (core team and community alike). We understand you had a shot at becoming the Next Big Thing a few years ago. It never happened, you're now reduced to a niche and you're trying to blame it on others with this kind of pathetic call to action.<p>The world has moved on from Rails, enjoy your niche and stop trying to get others to fix your mess (900 tickets... seriously?!?).

Decent message, but unnecessarily antagonistic. Regardless, I'm prompted to take a look at the bug queue and see if I can help a bit.

Anyone notice/figure out why his site doesn't display properly in mac chrome?<p>All the text shows weird characters.

<i>Well, in this analogy, you sit back and let the cashier do it all. All of you in the queue do. Nobody helps the poor cashier.</i><p>Nobody helps the cashier because you would be accused of trying to steal their money if you began grabbing money up off the floor.<p>FWIW: I did volunteer work for years and years. At some point, I concluded I would rather get paid for what I do. I am still trying to work out how to give away stuff I think 'should' be free but also get paid for my time and effort. It isn't easy to resolve questions like that -- at least it isn't for me and, from looking around me, it seems it isn't for most folks. At some point, I decided that if it made me bitter and angry to give my time and energy to something, then I was somehow doing it wrong.<p>At the risk of going down in flames horribly, my observation has been that a lot of hackers have, shall we say, limited social skills and this fact leads them to be enormously frustrated with things like this -- ie they often just don't know how to get people to do what they want them to do. Rather than go to someone who has actual social skills/management skills/whatever is needed, they then rail about the problem, usually in a way that alienates the very people they want to win over. My experience so far has been that most such individuals are not interested in constructive feedback on how they could more effectively manage that end of things. They feel "wronged" (or whatever) and telling them that what they are doing is counterproductive just seems to make them defensive. (Well, it seems to make most people defensive, regardless of their backgrounds.) But the reality is that if there is something you could do differently that would be more effective, learning about that is very empowering. About 99.99% of the time, you have no control over what other people do but you can exercise some control over your own behavior. So regardless of how badly I feel someone else has wronged me, I typically turn my attention to "what could I do differently?" and "who might help me learn to do something different and actually be effective?"<p>Good luck with this.

This guy must be new to open source. Most big open source projects have thousands of open bugs, many of which are outdated, wrong or not that serious.

I hear calling people names is an effective way to change behavior.