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I just have no sympathy for people who take, are not prepared to do any work, but feel entitled to say how others should do their job and issue demands for features, aircraft, documentation, whatever. You may call that elitism, I call that my sense of fairness. | I just have no sympathy for people who take, are not prepared to do any work, but feel entitled to say how others should do their job and issue demands for features, aircraft, documentation, whatever. You may call that elitism, I call that my sense of fairness. | ||
= You need development guidelines = | |||
You might have made general statements like 'There should be clear development guidelines', 'the project should not depend on a single person being around' or 'the developers should pay more attention to the users'. In theory, all these are beautiful - and who would object that these are all good things? | |||
The problem is that the reason that these things do not exist already have to do with how things are in practice - and you're not discussing that. The consequence of developers paying more attention to what users want, rather than what they are interested in, and not being free to ignore suggestions is that I potentially am asked to work on something I personally dislike because enough users want it. Nobody has said it to my face that this is what you want - but you don't need to, I can work out the consequences myself. Your whole case collapses because it doesn't talk about how to do things in practice: Who gets to decide what a relevant suggestion for the benefit of the project is and what a petty suggestion for the benefit of a single user is? Who gets to determine the guidelines and how - and what happens with people who don't want to follow? What happens if a developer doesn't want to code a feature even if 500 users signed a petition? What happens to a developer who belittles a conribution, and who enforces that and how? Once you start thinking these questions through, the moral high ground of the theoretical principles becomes a mud field of messiness and compromises. | |||
= Some comments on elitism = | = Some comments on elitism = |