It was actually much worse; after some deeper investigation it turned out that quite a few people were essentially “Americans with Scottish interests” and probably not really qualified to write Scots Wikipedia articles without a bit of supervision (which there wasn’t much of).
Any project that survives long enough/becomes popular enough, and has a public bug tracker, will eventually have some years-old bugs. And there will be some people who care about those bugs, or just want to use them as bludgeons which with to bash the project. Which means that this type of “They STILL haven’t fixed that!!?!?!!?!?!?!???!?!” comment can be written about any such project and is thus effectively content-free.
And the reasons why any particular bug might not be fixed to a particular person’s personal satisfaction are, of course, legion – maybe other things were rightly prioritized higher, maybe the proposed patch had flaws and nobody ever got round to improving it, maybe the simple fix would have negative effects elsewhere and nobody’s yet come up with a fix that doesn’t, maybe… lots of perfectly reasonable things. But that doesn’t get you upvotes compared to rolling your eyes and pointing out “lol, get a load of this old bug they still haven’t fixed!”
One thing that has helped me in getting patches accepted is to find out who has recently touched the code my patch touches and reaching out to that person to say “hey, I’ve done a thing. can you review it?”
As a maintainer of open source software, I would love it if people not only sent me patches, but also sent me an email asking for a review.
Funny. This is the team I’m in.
I’m sorry this took so long but interactions with CSP are really tricky architecture-wise. On the one hand, we want security checks to happen deeply in the code so they are implicit and hard to avoid when working with requests and such. On the other hand, we totally want web extensions - as a user preference that takes higher precedence than a website’s CSP - to ignore it if possible.
I guess all in all this might sound like a lame excuse but Thanks for coming up with a patch, even if it didn’t make it in.
I’m sorry this took so long […] all this might sound like a lame excuse
It’s okay - I work at a company whose products are open-source too and although we have less external contributors than Mozilla does there still are times where patches fall through the cracks, get forgotten and take years to be fixed.
I’m not specifically complaining about Mozilla - it’s more about this vague disconnect between the idea that everybody can contribute to open source and the fact that in the end there still are gate-keepers (that are very needed!) that will prevent your changes from making it upstream.
People frequently argue that once the patch is written you can just keep your fork around, merge upstream changes and use that, but in the case of very large software like Firefox, GCC, LLVM… this requires extraordinary computing resources (Firefox takes more than 2 hours to build on my 4-cores CPU and I have to completely stop using my computer, otherwise it shuts down, probably because of my undersized PSU…).
I don’t know how to solve this problem. In any case, I’m grateful for the work you and all other Mozilla contributors are doing - despite its catering less and less to my needs, Firefox is still my favorite browser :).
Was it translated by an American teen with no knowledge of Scots?
You can see who they claim to be, but on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog :)
Joke explainer for anyone who missed it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Scotland/comments/ig9jia/ive_discovered_that_almost_every_single_article/
Wait so…I read 30% of that post and then the end. Is it for real or is it a really lengthy play on the term “no true Scotsman?”
It was actually much worse; after some deeper investigation it turned out that quite a few people were essentially “Americans with Scottish interests” and probably not really qualified to write Scots Wikipedia articles without a bit of supervision (which there wasn’t much of).
This guy was by far the most prolific though. They ended up deleting or rolling back much of their content where possible, and adding a “this article was written by someone who is not a native speaker” to a lot of other stuff. Long discussion at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Large_scale_language_inaccuracies_on_the_Scots_Wikipedia
My personal favourite new features:
What are “catch-up paints”? I can’t find a good explanation.
And still two bugs 5yo and 4yo not fixed :(
Any project that survives long enough/becomes popular enough, and has a public bug tracker, will eventually have some years-old bugs. And there will be some people who care about those bugs, or just want to use them as bludgeons which with to bash the project. Which means that this type of “They STILL haven’t fixed that!!?!?!!?!?!?!???!?!” comment can be written about any such project and is thus effectively content-free.
And the reasons why any particular bug might not be fixed to a particular person’s personal satisfaction are, of course, legion – maybe other things were rightly prioritized higher, maybe the proposed patch had flaws and nobody ever got round to improving it, maybe the simple fix would have negative effects elsewhere and nobody’s yet come up with a fix that doesn’t, maybe… lots of perfectly reasonable things. But that doesn’t get you upvotes compared to rolling your eyes and pointing out “lol, get a load of this old bug they still haven’t fixed!”
The best way to get bugs fixed is to submit a patch. :-)
If only… I’ve sent a bunch of patches to Mozilla, none have been merged, the majority hasn’t even been reviewed :(.
One thing that has helped me in getting patches accepted is to find out who has recently touched the code my patch touches and reaching out to that person to say “hey, I’ve done a thing. can you review it?”
As a maintainer of open source software, I would love it if people not only sent me patches, but also sent me an email asking for a review.
Yeah, I do that too. Even with that, there’s a 50% chance the patch will be ignored (like here, for example).
Funny. This is the team I’m in. I’m sorry this took so long but interactions with CSP are really tricky architecture-wise. On the one hand, we want security checks to happen deeply in the code so they are implicit and hard to avoid when working with requests and such. On the other hand, we totally want web extensions - as a user preference that takes higher precedence than a website’s CSP - to ignore it if possible.
I guess all in all this might sound like a lame excuse but Thanks for coming up with a patch, even if it didn’t make it in.
It’s okay - I work at a company whose products are open-source too and although we have less external contributors than Mozilla does there still are times where patches fall through the cracks, get forgotten and take years to be fixed.
I’m not specifically complaining about Mozilla - it’s more about this vague disconnect between the idea that everybody can contribute to open source and the fact that in the end there still are gate-keepers (that are very needed!) that will prevent your changes from making it upstream.
People frequently argue that once the patch is written you can just keep your fork around, merge upstream changes and use that, but in the case of very large software like Firefox, GCC, LLVM… this requires extraordinary computing resources (Firefox takes more than 2 hours to build on my 4-cores CPU and I have to completely stop using my computer, otherwise it shuts down, probably because of my undersized PSU…).
I don’t know how to solve this problem. In any case, I’m grateful for the work you and all other Mozilla contributors are doing - despite its catering less and less to my needs, Firefox is still my favorite browser :).
I wish Firefox 92 would introduce sane version numbers.
We’re beyond that I’m afraid
We’ll have to think of something before we reach 100 though, the web isn’t ready for more than two digits.
Switch it over to hex digits? Start using the minor number?
I’m afraid
\dor0-9won’t match hex. But I’m sure they will find a way.Suggest folding into https://lobste.rs/s/361gd6