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I've been on both sides and I have to say that the road goes both ways. When I was getting started with a language last year I found a missing feature in a mod

I've been on both sides and I have to say that the road goes both ways. When I was getting started with a language last year I found a missing feature in a module of an open source library and submitted a very simple PR to add the feature. The maintainer asked me to completely refactor the module. I admittedly overreacted to this request—as I perceived it to be way too big of an ask—before settling down and getting to work on it. Then it literally took almost six months for the maintainer to review and merge my PR because of the intensity of the refactoring and performance regressions. (I would get some small piece of feedback, submit a fix or more information, wait weeks and weeks to hear back again, repeat ad naseum.) So yes, issue-reporters and PR-submitters can be irritating, demanding, and disrespectful of maintainers' time, but maintainers can be just as bad. Postscript: I don't regret the time I spent on it because it was an awesome learning experience, but it was certainly frustrating at the time!

dochtman 10y ago
As a maintainer, I understand that this must have been frustrating for you. On the other hand: the maintainer will have to maintain the changes you've contributed ~forever. Effectively, the contribution you're making, something that you can just throw at the maintainers, will have impact on their maintenance of the project for a long, long time. As such, I disagree that maintainers are "bad" for doing this; there's just a large disbalance between the time your one-off contribution takes and the time they might have to spend refining it and/or fixing bugs in it. Given that they might also be juggling a day job and working with a bunch of other contributors, getting there can take a lot of time. (Of course, they should still strive to be respectful about it, and as transparent as possible -- unfortunately, it's often hard to say in advance how much time it might take.)

dochtman 10y ago

As a maintainer, I understand that this must have been frustrating for you. On the other hand: the maintainer will have to maintain the changes you've contributed ~forever. Effectively, the contribution you're making, something that you can just throw at the maintainers, will have impact on their maintenance of the project for a long, long time. As such, I disagree that maintainers are "bad" for doing this; there's just a large disbalance between the time your one-off contribution takes and the time they might have to spend refining it and/or fixing bugs in it. Given that they might also be juggling a day job and working with a bunch of other contributors, getting there can take a lot of time. (Of course, they should still strive to be respectful about it, and as transparent as possible -- unfortunately, it's often hard to say in advance how much time it might take.)