[Arm-netbook] systemd nonsense ad-infinitum

[Elena ``of Valhalla'']

On 2017-07-04 at 13:07:33 -0400, Christopher Havel wrote:
> With all due respect, some people can't code. Do they not deserve a voice?

In the past, the FLOSS community was pretty bad at only valuing
contributions that involved writing code, and ignoring pretty much
everything else.

Nowadays, it depends a lot on which community you are involved with:
some are still of the idea that only code matters, but many more
recognise that software alone has limited usefulness, and that many
other kinds of contributions are just as important.

Debian these days is one such community (see e.g.
https://www.debian.org/intro/diversity and
https://contributors.debian.org/ and
http://www.enricozini.org/blog/2012/debian/more-diversity-in-skills/ for
some background on the latter), and while being somewhat technically
minded is helpful in finding something to contribute on, actual writing
of code is a minority of the available tasks.

One think that is *very* helpful is testing stuff, especially when using
rare configurations, and opening bugs when something isn't working as
expected.
It is true that does not always mean that they are going to be fixed,
but it is still useful.

* if there is no open bug on the bugtracker you can be 99% that it won't
  be fixed, opening the bug significantly raises the chances for a fix,
  even if it's not a guantee.
* by opening the bug you are showing that somebody is actually using
  that program/feature: sometimes minor stuff that the maintainers don't
  really care about are taking lots of their effort, and if they don't
  even know if anybody cares about it they are much more likely to just
  drop worrying about it.
* Not just the package maintainers see the bugs on their packages:
  sometimes other people notice them and may get involved and provide a
  patch, even if they are not the bug opener themselves.

While doing so, remember that (in the case of Debian) you're probably
requesting somebody to do something in their spare time, so they
may not answer immediately (or in the next week), and maybe the answer
will be that they can't fix the bug unless somebody else comes with a
patch, but being nice in the request usually leads to receiving nice
answers.

I agree that it's not a task suitable to anybody as it does require at
least a bit of proficiency in using linux systems and the ability to
follow instructions (probably involving the command line) to provide
more data if needed, but the set of people being able to to so should be
much bigger than the set of people who are able to succefully patch some
random code.

-- 
Elena ``of Valhalla''