When you're talking to an open source dev, just remember that they are literally giving you their time for free, and they are people who don't like to be treated poorly.
Edit: Just to be clear, I don’t mean any ill will toward the guy. He’s frustrated and he’s just taking it out in the wrong venue at the wrong people, but that doesn’t mean he’s a bad person.
Edit 2: The reinstalling he’s talking about is NPM. So just running npm install. It’s because he tried removing the node_modules directory, which is a reasonable thing to do, but it means you need to reinstall the modules with that command.
Me approaching Foss developer with bug: Pardon me, if you could grace this lowly worm with but a moment of your attention; I with me a bug report, and I believe I have found the section of code responsible. This inadequate being lacks the technical expertise to fix it and would be eternally indebted if you would turn your monumental skills upon its trifling problems. It would please me immensely if my paltry efforts were of some assistance.
You’ve clearly never worked with any psychopaths or narcissists. Often, pointed (though importantly, carefully offline and undocumented) cruelty is one of the only ways to effectively punch back and make people like that stop trying to fuck with you, because many people like that only really respond to threat dynamics. It’s not terribly common, and it’s not fun to do, but it definitely is warranted once in a blue moon.
Thanks. Send a complete log of every software on your system, two videos of the bugs in action, and a detailed analysis of what you've had for breakfast.
It is, until it isn’t. I’ve seen devs delete or abandon their projects because of too mush abuse. Nobody likes being yelled at. (Unless that’s your kink. I won’t judge.)
The amount of time i spend downloading random projects fixing the bug thats driving me insane making a pull just to have all my work redone by a maintainer cos im using a language i hardly ever use and have no clue what in the hell im doing so i hacked together some dodgy fix that makes u sick to look at. And i would still rather do that then be the guy complaining.
Actually a huge part of debugging is just figuring out where the problem is, so even if your fix isn’t great, you’ve still done a large portion of the work. I always appreciate pull requests, even if I ultimately don’t accept them. The fact that someone else is thinking about how to improve the project is always helpful.