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by mataug 1620 days ago
Given the limited resource at the disposal of an open source project team, they need to pick their battles carefully to produce the most value with the least resources.

For a mature project such as FFmpeg, migrating to a new bug tracking system may produce some value to a small set of people who are reporting bugs, but for the vast majority of FFmpeg users, it produces no value.

So in this particular case it seems like they are willing to sacrifice the convenience of a small subset of users in the interest of the whole user community.

This applies to many mature and long running projects.

1 comments

They can choose whatever priorities of course, but I'd disagree that it's not impacting anyone besides a small portion of the users. Discouraging bug reports reduces quality for everyone.

Those who report bugs might be a smaller portion, but projects need them I'd argue way more than those who use and never report anything to them.

I'd encourage browsing their Trac for context.. the handful of regular contributors definitely don't need any extra bug reporters
This kind of argument is exactly what I described above as an arrogant attitude. Not sure if developers actually use that in this case, but if some projects do - it's not a good thing at all.