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> Don’t “claim” issues or ask whether someone is already working on an issue. Instead, focus on creating a pull request which solves the issue. Once you create

by jakear 4y ago

> Don’t “claim” issues or ask whether someone is already working on an issue. Instead, focus on creating a pull request which solves the issue. Once you create a pull request we can assign your account to the issue to ensure others don’t start working on it in parallel. Having maintained popular OSS software in the past, this sounds problematic. I know “claiming” doesn’t work, people will regularly “claim” and issue then not be heard from ever again. But PR-to-claim sounds iffy, especially when money is involved. Failure modes I envision include people putting up low effort PR’s to lock the issue, then either wasting a bunch of maintainer time on reviews or getting into IP debates with people who later on create a proper PR that maybe includes a bit of the same routines. Perhaps if the PR author would stake cash that the maintainer/reviewer would receive upon review? The third party pr authors are asking for the other party to do work just as much as the maintainers are.

SethMLarson 4y ago
Thanks for raising this issue, you're right! There's no mechanism for making concurrent work impossible. We haven't had this problem of concurrent issues being worked on from start to finish in the past, maybe that will change with the bounty program? We haven't seen adversarial behavior yet but if it starts to be a problem we can address it, I agree that the language of "opening a PR" isn't super great. Maybe that section needs to be more general i.e. "we'll assign you the issue once you've made substantial progress towards the tasks" leaving that to be defined by maintainers. The possibility of "staking" money by the contributor is a non-starter. We aren't in the business of taking money from people who have good intentions and operationally I don't see a way forward there. This whole program is an experiment so we're open to being wrong about things at first. We'll be iterating based on feedback and providing a retrospective in a future newsletter.

by jakear 4y ago

SethMLarson 4y ago

Thanks for raising this issue, you're right! There's no mechanism for making concurrent work impossible. We haven't had this problem of concurrent issues being worked on from start to finish in the past, maybe that will change with the bounty program? We haven't seen adversarial behavior yet but if it starts to be a problem we can address it, I agree that the language of "opening a PR" isn't super great. Maybe that section needs to be more general i.e. "we'll assign you the issue once you've made substantial progress towards the tasks" leaving that to be defined by maintainers. The possibility of "staking" money by the contributor is a non-starter. We aren't in the business of taking money from people who have good intentions and operationally I don't see a way forward there. This whole program is an experiment so we're open to being wrong about things at first. We'll be iterating based on feedback and providing a retrospective in a future newsletter.