Upstream Modification; An Example

Question

I really enjoy plain text. It's easy on the eye, consistent across many applications, and can be manipulated in many different ways.
Choosing an rss reader that operated from the terminal was an easy choice. I found that newsbeuter filled 90% of all my feed reading needs.
But I had a problem.
Comics and pictures don't look so good in plain text. Every time I wanted to read Dilbert, Failblog, etc. I would have to open up firefox.
So rather than switch news readers, I submitted a ticket to the newbeuter ticket tracker. The ticket:
This is a feature request.
w3m (a text based web browser) has a great little feature that allows an
image link to be opened in an external viewer (like feh).
Since I subscribe to a few sites (dilbert, failblog, etc.) that have most
of their content in an image, this feature would really be nice.
In this case most of the heavy lifting is done in feh (it can open images
from a url) so all that would need to be done is an os command to launch
feh and some way to pass it the image url.
Thanks for the great rss reader. I use it daily.
Let's break down how I asked for this feature:
The first line specifically states what I want; a new feature.
The second line gives a supporting element; other applications do it this way, and I find it convenient. (Ethos)
The third line describes why I think it's important; I am a user, who likes your program, and I offer a suggestion about a modification. (Pathos)
The fourth line is the patch; Not a true patch in this case. But I offer a very direct method in implementing my idea from the previous line. (Logos)
The fifth line is a thank you; I like your program, I use it, and I want to make it better.
The response was really quick:
Will be implemented in newsbeuter 1.3. I implemented it by allowing macros to modify
the browser configuration variable, so with newsbeuter, you should be able to
configure something like this:
    macro i set browser "feh %u" ; open ; set browser "elinks %u"
All you need to do then is to press ",i" from the URLs view, and it will open the
currently selected URL with feh.
After, I made sure to thank the developer . . .
This is not the only way to ask for a feature, or help fix a bug. In general though, keep it short, and put the most important information as close to the top of the ticket as possible. Also, make small paragraphs, they are much easier to read.
If you are trying to fix a bug, remember to attach any and all logs, config files, screenshots, etc. You need to give as much information possible to help the developer out. (just remember to sanitize passwords, email accounts, user names, IP addresses, and domain names, out of the documentation.)
newsbeuter homepage
newsbeuter AUR package
Last edited by timetrap (2008-09-19 11:51:26)

Answer 1

Good work.
Imagine if you would have decided to write a patch yourself. You would have had to read & understand some good amount of someone else's code, and then you would have to change it & build it and submit it, possibly being out of line with the main author's way of thinking / code style, or maybe even introducing subtle bugs.
Smoothly describing almost exactly what should be done allowed the dev who knew what he was doing to do it real quick and easily. Is this even better than a patch for such a simple modification?
Anyway, it's a good example of how non-coders but generally competent users can contribute to a software project.
P.S. patches are good too: you would have learned something, maybe found bugs in the current code & fixed them, etc. But sometimes one doesn't want to get involved _that_ much.