The role of users

[Ross Boylan]

I am concerned about some of the attitudes expressed about users in the
recent "testing reports" thread.  Perhaps they reflects the origins of
the thread, which apparently concern something internal to the
development process, namely test suites.

Users can contribute to a project, aka be part of the community, without
becoming developers, in my view, but apparently not in the view of all
on this list.  Users can identify features they want, or areas where the
program doesn't work they way they want.  I hope that the developers
would take that into account, while recognizing that in a volunteer
effort they may not.

For example, years ago, I reported that the handling of stock sales
seemed really awkward to me.  I would like to think that had some value,
even if it didn't go beyond that.  It did go a bit beyond that, into
what desirable behavior would be.  The discussion ended with "send a
patch," which is not something I have time to do.  I don't recall if I
filed a bug; the response seemed to guarantee that nothing would be done
on it, and I didn't have a fully worked out alternative (nor did it seem
likely that offering a specification would change the probability of
action from 0), so I may not have.  And I don't use the program for my
main finances because of this problem, though I do use it for some
smaller things.

What is basically true, developers will work on what matters to them,
seems to have been elevated from "is" to "ought": developers should only
work on what matters to them, and should ignore what others want.  Which
is a very strange notion of community, and a strange notion of software
development.

Any user who can't offer a patch or a detailed specification seems to
get tagged as "throwing stones" or being a "free rider," and gets a
lecture about how they can't issue orders, even though a request is not
an order.

Gnucash is a complicated piece of software, and thus an outsider may
face a very high hurdle in actually implementing a desired feature even
if they are also a programmer.  To ignore requests because they don't
have a patch--which means  to ignore requests from users, since someone
contributing a  patch is in a developer, not user, role--is really
unfortunate.  To see every request or complaint as illegitimate sniping
or ordering is even worse.

Ross Boylan