[hibernate-dev] "Stale" Hibernate issues

[Martijn Dashorst]

Please bear with me, it's 1:45am and someone on the internet is wrong :-).

Somehow this triggered a knee-jerk reaction to an issue that is rather
minor, hasn't bothered me in months (every now and then I come across the
comment in our source code that references this particular hibernate issue,
and check the progress), and even when I go look at the status, I just
notice the time passed since its reporting and go on my merry way.

While it was not your intention, I guess the canned response to the issue
triggered my anti-something response.

For now this has taken more energy from myself, and probably you, so I
apologise for reacting the way I did.

For completeness sake, a IMO more subtle canned response would be (a bit
long, but hey, it's 1:45am):

"Hi, we thank you for reporting this issue. We are sorry that this issue is
still unresolved after all this time.

Our current backlog of unresolved issues is over 3000 items. While we do
our best to help our community, we are unable to address each of those 3000
issues ourselves. So we kindly ask you to lend us a hand in cleaning up our
backlog of issues: we ask you to check if this issue is still a problem for
Hibernate ORM 4.

If you are able to reproduce the issue in the current version of Hibernate,
please note the steps you took to replicate the unexpected behaviour in a
comment to this issue. It would be awesome if you can provide a test case
(see ... for more information on writing test cases).

This issue was selected because it had few votes, few participants and was
reported against a rather old version of Hibernate. If you don't respond to
this issue in a couple months, we will assume that this issue is no longer
a problem.

We thank you for your time and hope to resolve this issue soon.
"

IMO this would remove any possibility for coming across as arrogant or non
attentive. It shows the real issue, and asks for help. It also provides a
non-committed way to resolve the issue (reproduce it and we will look at it
because we now have time to do so, and know at which issues to look, or we
assume it is solved because nobody else was interested in it since a long
time). Note that this response does not promise to actually solve the
issue, but merely resolve it.

I will most definitely take a look at your project in HHH-9105 and roll
> something out for everyone to use as needed.  Thanks for that.  I'm
> definitely up for any more *constructive* ideas/feedback.
>

That is why I submitted it. Enjoy toying with it and I hope it will bring
many usable test cases.

Martijn