All the Bugs are My Fault

All the Bugs are my Fault

Meson 0.57.0 came out a little over two weeks ago now. It’s a big exciting release with a ton of work that went into it. I’ve already talked about all the Rust changes that I worked on for it. I also did a fair bit of refactoring to clean up and simplify some internal data structures, and to make our environment variable handling consistent and centralized. Unfortunately this led to some bugs, in fact, it led to almost all the regressions reported for Meson 0.57.0.

I’ll admit that I struggle a lot with anxiety and with the feeling that I do more harm than good, so seeing that huge list of regressions was not particularly encouraging. What was encouraging though is the level of professionalism that came with the bug reports. Each reporter simply reported the problems, there was no angry name-calling, no frustrations vented, even though some issues were serious regressions (one was pretty harmless, but the rest were not).

I’ve made some bug reports that I’ve had to apologize for, and some of my bug reports have responded to in ways that make me completely uninterested in working with a project again. We make a pretty big point in the open source community about accurate and useful bug reports, and we’re starting to talk about toxic developers/maintainers, but bug reporters can also be toxic. Taking a few minutes to calm down before you send that bug report and can make a big difference in the effect you have on others and the way you’re perceived.

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