Friday, January 19, 2007

No Thanks

One of the nice things about working in open source is that you interact directly with your customers (ie. the community) in an open forum via bug reports. When we, the committers, resolve a bug as fixed, it gives us a sense of joy that we made some user out there happy.

While implementing a highly-anticipated feature is a reward in itself, it would be nice to hear a thank-you every once in a while. Unfortunately, very rarely do we hear that thank you from users.

72 people have voted for a Text Drag and Drop feature. When it was finally implemented, not one thank you.

Oh well, such is life...

Thank you, Dani!

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Daniel ,Steve ,Duong Thanks guys.
And Wassim thanks for reminding to me to say thanks .
You guys are the coolest programmers in world !
-vish

Anonymous said...

I hate to point this out. But as yet there is just a patch in a bug tracker. Or maybe even a patch applied to code in the eclipse source repository. I am not sure that qualifies as something that would make users happy.

Fact remains most people won't be seeing this for months. So don't expect anything until we are all using it for real :)

Anonymous said...

In order to deserve thanks, you need to go a little above and beyond just doing the job you're paid to do.

Anonymous said...

I'm sorry - but I have to agree with "Anonymous" on this one. It is only in Bugzilla, and quite frankly it wasn't even clear to me that it was implemented successfully.

I am CC'd on quite a few bugs regarding drag and drop and it is quite confusing as to the current state of affairs. In fact, Bug #169534 was just resolved as WONTFIX - which #11624 depends on. I guess that it wasn't a showstopping dependency then if #11624 has been resolved (which I seem to have missed in the mass of bug emails I am CC'd on).

I think you'll see more response when it shows up in a release that people are actually using. I'm on the cutting edge (3.3M4) and I haven't seen it yet because the target is 3.3M5... So when I can test drive it you can bet I'll be thanking people. But for now - "thanks" for the Alanis video. I haven't heard that song in awhile... ;o)

BTW - A post in the New and Noteworthy would be a good idea when it does come out in a real build.

Eugene Kuleshov said...

It seems like this bug like over 4 years old. Most of the people either forgot about it, or moved to other IDEs. The rest is probably so happy that are laying unconscious now. If you are really hunting for thanks, you should be really quick in fixing bugs. :-)

Besides, there is bunch of other long awaited issues, like text wrapping, hyperlinks detectors, etc... So, thanks, but please keep up the good work.

Daniel Beck said...

A big "Thank you" from Germany!

Daniel