3 ms·
I think the author is missing a key point in that software is vastly more complex than it was in the 90’s. The few times I’ve tried to contribute to open source
by milesvp 6y ago
I think the author is missing a key point in that software is vastly more complex than it was in the 90’s. The few times I’ve tried to contribute to open source, I spent more time trying to convince projects that my pull requests fixed the problem without causing other issues. And this is largely because my fixes tend to fix integration problems I had with the software. These weren’t small changes that could be unit tested, and setting up test repro steps were non trivial. I don’t blame maintainers for being slow to accept these kinds of fixes, when the bugs are likely to effect a small minority of users. 30 years ago you could look at a patch and at least reason about it’s efficacy, now you have to have some idea about supporting ecosystems, and not just libraries you’re already using.
- StillBored 6y agoSo many of these projects are "mature" which means for many of them there is a risk to accepting random pull requests. In the past a growing project tended to take them without to much worry under the assumption that if a patch broke something it would get fixed. Now there is a fear of the effort required to dig through the mountains of code to "support" someone who is screaming about the code breaking.
- jdxcode 6y agoI agree. In my experience maintaining, the work validating a PR is substantially more than writing the initial code as well. There is also a significant maintenance cost that falls on the maintainer after the code has shipped. In other words, even if your contribution is perfect, it's still probably putting more work on the maintainer than you did yourself.