Thanks for bringing it up though, I went for spicy programmer drama but instead found a somewhat interesting and incredibly polite disagreement. I am curious about what happened that they have such a solid opinion about acceptable use of file metadata.
Not sure I agree. Here's one comment by the developer (laurent):
"Ok, there's so much wrong in what you write about that it's hard to know where to start. I guess it would help if you had a clue about what you're talking about."
I'm not proud of that answer but to be fair there are also more balanced views in this thread. It's also an old thread and some of what's in there is no longer relevant. For example someone recently created a prototype of the app that saves the notes to disk, and although we can't merge his work as it is, we plan to investigate and see whether it can be somehow integrated.
It's one of these features that, all things being equal, we'd rather have than not have, but it's obviously not trivial to add it when the app wasn't originally designed for it.
I completely understand. It wasn't my intention to blow this out of proportion. It's a single expression of frustration that every developer can relate to.
Sure - but it is a departure in tone and sandwiched by more normal and productive comments (from that dev). It isnt ideal but it is also a pretty normal and minor human mistake (growing frustrated and then short to be specific).
And the previous comments were claiming that this project's data was 'proprietary' and not 'open' and the situation was inexcusable, basically because they assumed a database was this big scary thing (as opposed to an open book). That is a frustrating experience, and yeah maybe indicates that the person telling you how to write software doesn't know what they are talking about (for the folks following along at home, those frivolous cries of foul play were distracting from the real need they had for plain text over a database, someone else describes it quite succinctly a little later)
Sure, it's no big deal and it's completely understandable. I just wouldn't characterise it as "incredibly polite".
I think file system vs database storage is very much about trade-offs. Unfortunately the debate descends too quickly into who is right and who is wrong.
It's always difficult for developers to talk to users who often really don't know what they are talking about. I know that very well.
The only thing you can do as a developer (if you have time and patience) is to translate what users say into the closest thing that does make sense in terms of trade-offs.
I applause Laurent's answer.
I'm so tired of self-entitled users that don't contribute anything and have no skin in the game and just complain "this should be done as I say because I'm smart". Yes, obviously sometimes maintainer can get something bad and a better solution is easily available, but as app complexity goes up, it's unfair (to not say naive or a worse word) for users assume that developers are clueless and hadn't thought about the problem space before taking the design decision.
Thanks for bringing this one up. It's almost strange to see a civilized discussion about something that clearly polarizes a lot of people in the thread. Makes me wonder exactly what kind of social dynamic results in a bunch of people actually talking through their differences, instead of the these days usual trench warfare...
Thanks for bringing it up though, I went for spicy programmer drama but instead found a somewhat interesting and incredibly polite disagreement. I am curious about what happened that they have such a solid opinion about acceptable use of file metadata.