Looking at the comments in that ticket, I can understand why ffmpeg developers don't want to help those people, and the devs probably spoiled more time answering this annoying person than it would take to have fixed the issue, making them lose all motivation to work on that issue.
> But what to do with such a person if you can't/won't ban them from posting?
How about ignoring details and only focus about the technicality?
Looking at that way too long thread, both sides seem to be blamed on way or another. From what I can see, HDR support missing is actually an issue. Instead of letting him know they accept the bug, they are feeding him with rhetorical questions .
Developers should not worry about this people. They should not take pride in making people happy but take it from knowing millions and millions of people will benefit from your code. No matter how much of an asshole the bug reporter is, a bug / missing feature is just that.
Then the OP started complaining... that it's taking too long to fix, that ffmpeg developers are not paying attention to his bug... etc, all while ignoring everything said to him
That person is causing all the pointless animosity.
I do agree that it looks like they should not have engaged him on his level by pouring gas on the flames every time he went off the rails. Remaining on topic would have been the "professional" way to go I guess and just leave him to rant alone. They did take the bugreport though and never questioned that it was valid. All of that still does not excuse the behaviour of the reporter.
I think your assessment that developers should not derive any pride from happy users and are merely there to serve a greater good is a bit far from reality. Maybe they should not worry about things like this but then again these are also just people living their lives. This is not a corporate entity where you engage with a PR representative, these are people, doing what they like to do.
I mean it's not about making this toxic person happy in particular, but the huge amount of people this person is representing. It was in response of saying why even bother and stay motivated with people like this.
This person isn't doing anything wrong. He's appealing to what he perceives as universal principles to attract attention to a technical matter of importance to him. Yes, he's being aggressive; no, there's nothing wrong with that.
If you take away the voices of such people, pretty much the only voice left speaking is the voice of corporate money, which is usually anthithetical to the principles of open source development.
EDIT: Especially considering features like Gopher and MSP were deemed worthy of attention, the fact that his point about HDR metadata being silently stripped was not being addressed in a year is concerning.
>Yes, he's being aggressive; no, there's nothing wrong with that.
Being an asshole is bad, specially when you are asking for help. Not being an asshole doesn't make you a corporate shill nor being an asshole make your feedback "better".