20,741
edits
How the FlightGear project works: Difference between revisions
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
m
How the FlightGear project works (view source)
Revision as of 17:43, 8 February 2012
, 8 February 2012→Ideas getting ignored or rejected
| Line 47: | Line 47: | ||
Not every suggestion made in the forum or on the devel list is good. While no one deserves to be belittled, a fair share of suggestions deserve to be ignored (unless you feel you are entitled to 30 minutes time from, say, a 3d rendering specialist who explains to you in detail why your idea really doesn't work in non-technical terms - I don't). There are many questions asked where the answer can be found in the Wiki with a short search. There are suggestions being made which even on first glance are impossible in practice. It's not the developer's job to deal with these things - it's your job as a forum user to do so. And not every rejection needs to be taken as personal grievance carried around for the next years - sometimes one just has to allow for the possibility that one has been wrong. | Not every suggestion made in the forum or on the devel list is good. While no one deserves to be belittled, a fair share of suggestions deserve to be ignored (unless you feel you are entitled to 30 minutes time from, say, a 3d rendering specialist who explains to you in detail why your idea really doesn't work in non-technical terms - I don't). There are many questions asked where the answer can be found in the Wiki with a short search. There are suggestions being made which even on first glance are impossible in practice. It's not the developer's job to deal with these things - it's your job as a forum user to do so. And not every rejection needs to be taken as personal grievance carried around for the next years - sometimes one just has to allow for the possibility that one has been wrong. | ||
Since I work on Flightgear, I have suggested a lot of things - about 10% of which have been reacted on. To give you a current example: I've noticed that models from Nasal load way slower than needed, and I've asked that someone looks into it. I have not expected that somebody immediately jumps on it and spends 10 hours of his time tracking what is going on and delivers a detailed report in non-technical terms later. It has taken a few months and posting several examples to convince people that what I see is real. Then somebody looked at it and traced it to the (non)-existence of the osg texture cache. Now, people are debating the pros and cons of activating the texture cache by default, because it might affect stability and memory usage in an unwanted way - and I don't know if it will eventually be there. | |||
I have no problem with that - neither with convincing people that my suggestion is worth looking into, nor with the fact that other issues I have not thought of need to be taken into account. But it seems a lot of people in the forum expect that because they suggest something, someone will take it very seriously and act quickly and are then disappointed when this isn't actually the case. | |||
Coming from the other side, having worked on a problem I often know that a particular thing suggested cannot be done easily. If I have the time, I can take 20 minutes to explain why. Sometimes I don't have the time, then I just write a small sentence indicating why it doesn't work. Probably then somebody feels ignored. Can't help it - if I'd try to take the time, my 3 year old daughter would feel ignored, and she needs my attention more. | |||
I just lack any sign from the user community that they're willing to accept that a suggestion or feedback can in fact be dismissed, and that a developer's time to explain why a suggestion cannot be followed is also not unlimited. I have no problem with the users providing 50% of an opinion where the project should go - as long as they don't expect that that opinion necessarily translates into a decision. | |||
= Users vs. contributors = | = Users vs. contributors = | ||