People and feature requests.

Update: Apperently some people lost their sense of humor along the way, so to make it clear, this was meant to be more of a joke post than serious! :-) Just like the bloody last sentence says (in a way).

Who hasn’t gotten a utterly stupid feature request before ? Or even a request that you constantly say no to. This is just bound to happen if you help maintain a open source project (probably even more so in a commerical entity)

Well I have found the perfect answer to such requests with the courtesy of the yum wiki

No. Just no. If you don’t like it, go have a conversation with yourself about it. Alone. At home. In your closet.

I’ve even been pondering about adding this as an answering option in pear/pecl/php bug system, I can just see Jani doing the happy dance if this kind of thing would ever be added. ;-)

A slightly modified version of this quote could even be used on reports like this one: http://bugs.php.net/35625

All jokes aside, I had a good laugh when I read this quote and the bug report :-)

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6 Comments to “People and feature requests.”

  1. I disagree in some respect, because some developers even refuse to implement many optional features that are disabled by default. And I speak of projects where not everyone can just patch that in, but the (lead) developer has to do that. It doesn’t hurt anybody, still some refuse with obsession. Would be like abandoning PECL in a whole and allow no custom/new extension. I just dislike feedback where people demand silly features as default.

  2. I find this a horrible reply, no matter how ‘stupid’ a feature request is.
    I welcome each and every feature request and bug report to my software. I find it an honor if someone takes the time to e-mail me or to post in our forums to request a feature that they would like. Also, a request is never stupid. It always comes from a desire that a user has. We can’t possible fathom al the ways users use our software, and somehow, they have a wish that they would like to see in the software. Even if I can’t honor the request, I always try to help and see if there are other ways to help this person.

    Sometimes a feature request is not a really good idea, but then it’s essential to find out what the underlying problem is, and see if there are other solutions to this problem. Perhaps a different feature that is less ‘stupid’ but that helps the person who send the request in a similar manner.

    A ‘no, go away’ reply is simply appalling. I will drive your users away from you.

  3. (that last sentence should’ve been ‘It will drive your users away from you’)

  4. Seems that some people here are not getting that this was meant to be a joke post rather than something serious.

  5. Well, but imho this can be a problem, normally when your audience aren’t specialists or software developers but a more casual market like gamers and the typical webforum-users. Apparently you haven’t gotten such feature requests where you have to think about three corners to figure out what the people really mean and can then help them. Or they just request features they haen’t found in the config, that’s a little bit stupid imho. Sorry, if I seem to be lacking humour at all, though. At least I chuckled a bit, when I read it first.

  6. fa: I actually have been around such market :-) Maintained a gaming software once (beside working at a gamers lan cafe and operating a 300+ people lan) so I surely do understand what you and Ivo mean :)

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