[Interest] Ashamed bug :)

[Volker Hilsheimer]

> On 4 Sep 2021, at 17:41, Bernhard Lindner <private at bernhard-lindner.de> wrote:
> 
> 
>> The entire process is either difficult or easy.
> 
> No. Actually it can be both: Difficult for an outsider and easy for a experienced Qt
> developer. 
> 
> -- 
> Best Regards,
> Bernhard Lindner


For someone that develops on Qt every day, applying a patch and pushing it to gerrit is of course easy, even though it is a complex process. For someone that has never done it, it’s a fairly steep learning curve, and even a simple workflow can be daunting.

And even for someone that works on Qt every day and might even be familiar with the code in question, developing a reliable unit test can be a very challenging task, esp for bugs where the file system is involved. Your unit test must establish a file system that can be reliably tested, not leave any stray file system entries behind even when failing, etc. It can be very least laborious and error prone, especially if you don’t want to use Qt APIs for that in order to be able to meaningfully test those Qt APIs.

But that’s missing the point I evidently failed to make.

I’m not a native English speaker myself, and I respect that bug reports, comments, emails, or chat messages from folks that don't command the language perfectly can come across as harsher than they were perhaps intended.

But when someone claims that a bug in Qt is easy to fix, so easy in fact that we should be ashamed (or even perhaps just embarrassed) that it hasn’t been fixed yet; if they are even suggesting that they know exactly what calls are missing where, but then don't even bother to share this insight with those of us in the email so that someone who doesn’t have to climb the contribution learning curve can perhaps do something about it… that’s a bit much.


Cheers,
Volker