On 10/18/2011 2:20 AM, Invisible wrote:
>> Some dependencies are very coarse, yes. Some are not. Your assumption,
>> based on a high level understanding, is incomplete - and you certainly
>> *could* ask for more information about it and possibly even contribute to
>> making it better.
>
> IME, although the open source development model means that theoretically
> anyone can contribute to improving the product, in practise this doesn't
> work. It's extremely rare for submitting a bug report to actually result
> in a fix. [That's assuming the problem is even strictly speaking a "bug"
> and not merely a "hey, maybe if the system looked more like THIS it
> might be better".] Actually contributing code is usually a practical
> impossibility, for various reasons.
>
> I'm sure somebody somewhere is committing code. But for most of us, it's
> just not an option.
>
This is *highly* dependent of which distro and/or project you are 
talking about. There is a habit, once a project, or even a distro of an 
OS, gets beyond a certain popularity, either bugs start getting ignored, 
due to the number reported spiking, or they start munging with the 
interfaces, and features, and neglect actual problems. There is probably 
also an unfortunate tendency for some people to think, "Wow, everyone is 
using this, so everyone must be fixing it, so I will just sit and wait 
for them to do so." All of those things combined result in the smaller, 
less known, ones often progressing faster than the really well known 
ones, in some cases. The latter loose focus on what matters, which is 
everything bloody working right, even after you added some new feature.

This can also even result in, "We are too busy to fix that right now, so 
your code that *does* fix it is going to vanish into a black hole."

Or, so it seems to me, from things I have read off and on, with various 
things, once enough people started paying attention to them, versus when 
they where "new".

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