It continuously amazes me… the number of people who expect something done for free and want it done now. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if it is a consequence of the internet era as I struggle to come up with non-internet based examples.

What started me on this rant was a comment I saw in the while investigating whether a new episode of an anime series I am watching was released by the fansub group yet. It had been a while since the last release, so I looked at the comments of the previous episode to see if there were any clues to when more releases would be made (I know for a fact the next two have been translated). To paraphrase one comment: “Why are you so slow… maybe you should find something else to sub? There’s already quality subs out there that are getting released at a stable pace, so why bother?“. My initial thought was that the poster put the solution to their “problem” right in their comment. Now consider that this is a one-woman subbing group (well, there is a timer and a quality checker for this series) and she has just had final exams and a fairly serious illness according to her Twitter posts. I bet that if you were not thinking “wanker” before, you are now. This behaviour is not just restricted to this particular subbing group; I have noticed similar posts in the comments section for almost all series I am currently watching.

I see similar things all the time in the Arch Linux forums and bugtracker and even my email inbox. I can guarantee that every time there is a kernel release, there will be a post asking when it will be packaged within a day. What I am finding amusing is that 1/3 of the first page I get with the “Show new posts” link is threads asking for help with issues caused by the 2.6.30 release. But it is sad that the overlap of the users demanding the release and those complaining about it afterwards is not as big as it is in my dream world. Although, going back through old posts, there was definitely some overlap when KDE-4.x was released.

I had plenty of emails telling me of the immediate need to update ruby to the 1.9 branch. In the end I gave in and pushed the release to [testing], breaking gvim in the process. I got no angry emails about breaking gvim, which leads me to conclude gvim users > ruby users or (more likely) [testing] users > ruby users, on some scale where being greater than is a good thing. Those in the overlap of those groups are questionable… Similarly, I have had a number of emails telling me that python-3.0 is out and it is a “production release” (to somewhat laughably quote one user). That means that Arch is not keeping to its rolling release mantra and the python package needs updated. NOW! I used to reply with an email asking for patches for every package in our repos so they would either run with python-3.0 or would use python-2.x when the main binary was located at /usr/bin/python2. I never got a response.

Now I just add people who complain to a filter list so I will never see another email from them. This makes me immensely satisfied.