Being nice

Sometimes I think people in the open source world could learn to be a lot nicer. I often see negative or hostile attitudes from more experienced people within a community towards less-experienced newcomers.

Take this ticket for example:

1. User runs into error with Rails, thinks he’s found a bug and opens a ticket; in reality he was just using it wrong but that’s beside the point here, because…
2. User investigates problem and comes up with patch to fix it.
3. Key rails contributor comes down on user saying, "Please read the association docs or take this to the email list - Trac is not a support forum." (emphasis added).

When did the user try to use the trac as a support forum? He evidently thought he had found a bug (his summary reads, "hasmany :through _broken for belongs_to on 2.0 preview") and thought he was helping the community by reporting it. He then went further and attached a patch to fix the problem. How is this a support request?

Now the Rails veteran in this case is Josh Susser, who from everything I’ve seen elsewhere is a pretty nice guy. Perhaps this was just an isolated slip-up, but I think that experienced open source folks should be little less keen to jump on new users and "bring them into line"; it’s all too easy to scare them off, or at the very least communicate the wrong image.