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Well, sure, but you can say, "I'm sorry, I just don't have the time to do that right now." They can then either fork the project and implement the changes thems
by quanticle 5y ago
Well, sure, but you can say, "I'm sorry, I just don't have the time to do that right now." They can then either fork the project and implement the changes themselves or better yet, step forward and ask if they can help with the maintenance of the project.
EDIT: I glossed over this part when I was reading the article, but indeed there are many open source developers who do hold this attitude:
Halliday—better known by his handle substack—takes an uncommonly hands-off approach to his work. “I have all my GitHub notification emails turned off,” he says. If someone finds a problem with his code or wants a feature added to a module he’s no longer working on, they’re free to fork his code. That is, after all, the open source way. But he doesn’t put effort into issues or pull requests for packages he considers finished. “It’s not my job to keep tabs on every little thing I wrote years or decades ago very often,” he says. “I am always busy with new projects and if I was always looking back at old projects I wouldn’t have enough time to move forward.”
I fully agree with this viewpoint and I think it's good for the overall software ecosystem if engineers did more due diligence on the packages that they use.
- calvinmorrison 5y agoWhich is why I always say "show me the code" or "we accept patches".
- quanticle 5y agoI thought about writing "patches are welcome" as an example response, and I deliberately chose, "I'm sorry, but I just don't have time for that," instead. Reviewing a patch, in many cases, takes somewhere between 50% and 75% of the time it takes to write the code in the first place. It's not a given that someone who open sourced a random project will have time to review patches.
- kop316 5y agoPersonally, I much prefer "patches are welcome". It puts the ownership back on that person who asked for XYZ feature to do it. If that person is actually motivated enough to write a patch (which I have had!), I welcome reviewing it, because it empowers that person to feel like they can contribute to my project (and hopefully other projects too!), and makes others feel like they can contribute to my project as well.
- lupire 5y agoPatches are always welcome on your fork. Upstream can merge whenever they want.
- meetups323 5y agoHah. I regularly see patches whose review takes well over 100% the time it would have taken me to create the patch myself. But then I'm employed by $MEGA_CORP and part of the job description is "helping to build and maintain the OSS community", so helping novices create their first patches is a big part of that.