[alphard]

Changing his mind (without hinting that he may have been wrong) was a step in the right direction, and he did propose a clean fix that will prevent other similar bugs, but he flagged this as a wishlist which shows that he still doesn't consider it to be of major importance. He could always safeguard the script and treat his suggestion as a wishlist item, which would have been more reasonable.

[davidw]

The absurd thing is that one simple, proposed patch (#20) is just a few lines of actual code - far less than all the "blah blah blah" attached to the bug report.

[coffeeaddicted]

It fixes the problem now but does nothing to prevent the same problem showing up again in another script. Good maintainers are careful about putting some band-aid over a problem instead of fixing it. And from what he said it seems he rather plans fixing it in Upstart instead of having to patch scripts every-time. That does not sound absurd to me.

[alphard]

Well, although the maintainer's initial responses weren't very helpful it seems that the bug had already been fixed.

I guess it was really just a case of a bad day after all but he handled it gracefully in the end. This recent post clarifies things: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/upstart/+bug/55717...

[amatriain]

Personally I don't care whether he admits he was wrong or not. I do care that the bug is fixed.

And frankly some of the comments in that bug are going the route of personal attacks against the maintainter, which I don't think is very productive.

[krainboltgreene]

"Don't Do That Then" is productive?

[jacquesm]

Not only is it not productive, it's disingenuous. After all, tihs is a bug that in the worst of cases you're going to be hit by only once (unless you're a masochist), so whoever you tell 'don't do that then' that has just experienced your bug already knows that.

It's the people that haven't experienced it yet that are at risk, and you can't tell those 'don't do that then' preemptively.