More understanding responses from the core team would be appreciated

A May Of WTFs
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Today, I was looking for a solution to have ActiveStorage upload files to S3 path/folder.

I was shocked when I found this issue and saw abrupt conversation ending and closing of issue with “No, sorry”: Folder with active storage · Issue #32790 · rails/rails · GitHub

Many other developers agreed that at least some form of explanation could have been provided. There are 288 thumbs down on that “No, sorry” comment alone (not a great absolute metric, but you get the picture).

Here’s how some developers perceived it:

It’s unreasonable IMO to simply say “no”, close the issue, give no explanation of any kind and offer no alternatives besides “increase your bucket limit” and “use a different file storage”

I’d like to suggest the post-mortem on this conversation is that the mod missed the social/community context of how many people were involved / cared, here on github, and therefore didn’t give enough support to move the conversation to the mailing list. Had they done that, it would have created a more supportive and welcoming environment.

I think a simple response: “we don’t plan to introduce this functionality now, but we’re open for PRs” would be much, much better.

Thanks!

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I think a simple response: “we don’t plan to introduce this functionality now, but we’re open for PRs”

Although it came late, that is basically what happened in the end, see Sept 1 comment:

So it looks like that feedback already got through.

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Thanks for the feedback. My comment was too curt. I think I’ve apologized for it elsewhere, and I’ll apologize here again.

I have feelings about the reaction there—as it relates to that issue in particular and expectations of OSS maintainers in general—but I’ll put them aside for now. I’m sorry. I should have been more open-minded.

11 Likes
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Random lurker here, not connected to the Rails team. I think this expectation is a bit unfair. Sugarcoating an answer to a single question is trivial. Doing that for 13k issues worth of questions is a lot of thankless work. That’s work I wouldn’t take on even if I were paid to do so.

This answer might have turned away potential contributors. That’s not up to me to judge. The only party who’s entitled to make a call on that is the Rails team.

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I think I’ve apologized for it elsewhere

Yes you did already, here (Discourse shows a generic block but is a link to your comment):

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Hey George!

Thanks for clarifying that!

Your reply and closing the issue immediately, without any room for conversation, caught me by surprise. As-if: we don’t need that and don’t think that’s useful, end of discussion. I know that’s not what you meant, but that’s the first impression I got.

Sorry to have pointed at your comment directly as a source of frustration.

Perhaps, to avoid further confusion, you could edit your comment and add something like: EDIT: Here’s the more detailed explanation.

So any developers who see if for the first time won’t have the same experience like I had.

Thanks for all the work you’ve done!