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What are the well-understood reasons? It seems weird to me, as someone who hasn’t worked on open source, that the PR would just sit there untouched and not even

• mikepurvis 5y ago
  I'm not seeing an easy reference right now, but I feel like a number of articles bemoaning the state of open source maintainership have come up over the years, particularly in conjunction with high profile security issues like the ones in the OpenSSL and log4j projects. But in short, the maintainers are mostly uncompensated, and therefore have no sense of urgency or obligation to a faceless stranger making a drive-by contribution. Every accepted contribution is something that has to be understood, supported, and even justified by the project's maintainers going forward, so each one is an opportunity to take on more work and risk, and obviously by definition almost all them are things the maintainers didn't themselves "need" or they would have done it themselves. So each new branch or bugfix is relevant to a codepath that no one involved in the planning, testing, or release-preparation for that project has a first-class stake in. Each new capability added is an opportunity for there to be shrieks following a release because it was inadvertently broken in the course of some other bit of development.