Comment by account42

> Having run engineering teams for some reasonably popular open source products, my experience is that community reported issues can easily out-pace engineering capacity.

The solution to that is to have an additional triaging capacity. That can come from the community if you empower them with e.g. a public bug tracker.

If you truly do not have enough capacity to even fix the valid bugs then you have much bigger problems and no change to the bug reporting mechanisms will help you.

> As an aside, I find your opinion that "if I give you my time in the form of a bug report, the least you can do is give me your time" to be common. We rarely have the right to demand another person's attention, though. Especially with respect to non-commercial open source hobbyist maintainers.

This discussion is in the context of a post about a getting users to report bugs. Users might not be entitled to a response to their bug reports just because they spent their time but you sure as hell are not entitled to users telling you about issues encountered with your software before they inevitably get fed up and move to an alternative. The point is that if users feel they are wasting their time they won't bother - and the first to go will be the high-effort bug reports with useful information.

And this isn't really different for open source hobby projects - as long as you care about improving your software you'd do well to not make users who are willing to make good bug reports feel unwelcome.