Thursday, June 4, 2009

A pet peeve of mine

One pet peeve of mine is when people send MaraDNS support requests or bug reports via private mail. When someone does this, I get irritated and angry to the point that smoke starts coming out of my ears. The thing is that I'm working on rewriting the Deadwood resolver and after spending hours on a given day working on the code, I'm pretty burnt out and just don't have the time to deal with support email.

So, I've made it pretty clear that I don't do free private email MaraDNS support.

Despite this, I got two requests for MaraDNS support via private email last week.

AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!

When I explained my "pay me to support policy" to one of these people, they explained that they didn't know how to file non-security bug reports for MaraDNS. So, I've now clarified that the MaraDNS mailing list is the place to file your bug reports and that I don't have the time to maintain a bug tracker for MaraDNS.

In addition, so that these kinds of emails can be more easily handled, I have just hacked together a Perl script (taking my spam filter Perl script and making the appropriate changes) to make it trivial for me to send a "Show me the money or, if you're a cheapskate, here's how to take this concern to the list" form reply to people who ask for MaraDNS support via private email.

I'm really sorry guys. I'm devoting all of my time I spend developing MaraDNS on getting Deadwood out the door. I just don't have time to adequately handle MaraDNS support or non-security bug reports via private email. Please pay me for my time to take it to the list.