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> Yep, the problem is cultural. The whole system of reciprocity is out of whack. The system would work more smoothly if more people took on responsibilities, QA
by mstade 9y ago
> Yep, the problem is cultural. The whole system of reciprocity is out of whack. The system would work more smoothly if more people took on responsibilities, QA'd, contributed patches. Give engineers a % of time to contribute back to the libraries they use.
It's more nuanced than that I'm afraid. I work on tooling for a living, and have in fact tried to contribute back to babel but unfortunately there's so much noise and traffic that there's just as good a chance that your PR is stuck in limbo forever than being merged or even reviewed. I understand why, there's only so much the maintainers can do with the limited time they have, but my point is that you can't just say that the problem is that people aren't contributing. It's a two-way street, and maintainers need to figure out how to actually accept (or reject) contributions as well.
There are other ways to contribute than opening PRs and issues of course, like sending money. But even sending money isn't without complexity -- plenty of companies have the ability to contribute financially, but they can't because they need a VAT receipt or invoice to make it happen. Accounting is a hard requirement for companies, you can't just send money willy-nilly like you can as a private person. It's surprisingly difficult for companies to contribute financially to most projects, and that's not even considering the hard ship of getting those expenses signed off which is often a battle and a half on its own. Babel has a decent set up, but still requires a credit card -- this alone makes it much harder since you'd probably have to personally expense it and then try to get it past accounting.
It's a problem, for sure, but I don't think it's as black and white as you make it seem.
- hzoo 9y ago> I work on tooling for a living, and have in fact tried to contribute back to babel but unfortunately there's so much noise and traffic that there's just as good a chance that your PR is stuck in limbo forever than being merged or even reviewed. I agree it's a two way street and not all maintainers want to be "purely" what people consider a maintainer role unlike me - but it's a lot of responsibility on their part to have to look at every PR in a certain amount of time. I think contributors could also do more to ask and get involved although it will take more energy on both sides parts: like doing a hangout/video call etc even though it feels like people either maintainer or contributor just think making a PR suffices to get something merged when a lot of times it is so much more. I think what I'm saying is that if you do get the time to make a PR and if employers allowed it, they should also allow for the time it takes to get through the noise and traffic by helping out with maintenance, not just the bug fixes, or that we need a priority kind of thing so that maintainers/contributors see effort from one another to make it better. Yeah it's definetely not that simple but I think we need more people/companies trying it out to really see what the problems are then just talk about it.
- mstade 9y agoI agree, but as a contributor there’s only so much you can do if the receiving end isn’t, well, receiving. Plenty of people try to contribute but either the receiving end is unreasonably difficult to work with – or, as is perhaps more often the case – simply aren’t responding at all. It’s hard to get on a call where the other end isn’t picking up, as it were. I’ve seen this first hand several times. Despite numerous attempts to make things as easy as possible to merge, providing ample documentation for the changes, making yourself available etc., the receiving end simply isn’t picking up. At some point you just give up and let it be. Sometimes, I’ve seen my PRs get picked up months or even over a year after initially submitted, at which point even I as the author don’t know what the PR is all about anymore...