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As someone who maintains a couple of open source projects and tries to welcome external contributions, I can understand your frustration but I think complaining

by twiss 3y ago

As someone who maintains a couple of open source projects and tries to welcome external contributions, I can understand your frustration but I think complaining about getting no response after less than a week is also a bit premature. Yes, we should strive to respond as soon as possible, but you never know, it might be a very busy week for the maintainers, or they might be on vacation (it's August after all), who knows. Give them some time! Briefly glancing at the GitHub project, it has 11 open PRs and 1035 closed ones, I think those are pretty reasonable stats :)

tylerritchie 3y ago
I strongly agree. I'm not convinced this submission is on-topic. 5 days without a human response is not great but it's not _awful_. Neither of the tagged reviewers have public commits in the last week, they may (hopefully are) both on vacation and enjoying some of the summer. I've had open-source PRs wait for a couple months before people were able to take a look, stuff happens, people have things come up and people have competing priorities. I really want to point out the timeline here: - drive-by PR was opened Sunday 8/6 at 8AM PT - CLA was agreed to Sunday 8/6 at 8:30AM PT - two... maintainers? were pinged Sunday 8/6 at 11:11AM PT - grumpy missive about Microsoft was written Friday 8/11 and posted to HN at 10:25AM PT 4 work days without a comment on a drive-by PR seems... fine?
doctorpangloss 3y ago
> Briefly glancing at the GitHub project, it has 11 open PRs and 1035 closed ones, I think those are pretty reasonable stats :) It's crazy to me that Microsoft's extremely asinine policy of closing real issues, because they made issue closing a metric, has directly played into real organic social media positive feelings for them.
- yorwba 3y ago
  PRs, not issues. And 800 of those 1035 are merged.
- joshuamorton 3y ago
  This is Pull Requests, not issues. And glancing through them, the majority of the closed ones are merged, and the majority of the unmerged ones are low effort/not real, or were closed with guidance on how to resubmit them better.
Alupis 3y ago
I don't know actually... Calculator is built into the Windows OS - a for-profit operating system developed by a for-profit corporation, and people expect it to work and be accurate. If there's bugs, it means it's impacting people and their calculations, and there aren't exactly any other easily accessible built-in alternatives. It's one thing to be FOSS, but open sourcing Calc.exe doesn't really make it a real FOSS project. It's more of a novelty for Microsoft it seems. I would expect PR's and Issues to alert a staff engineer at Microsoft who oversees public contributions. It's not like Calc is a huge project with thousands of contributors each year. Otherwise... it feels like just tossing the issue over the fence.
Dhikshith12 3y ago
Please forgive me with your mighty experience, I'm young, naive, and impatient, new to the open source, and the software industry, I received a lot of criticism for this article, and I'll learn to do better and be more patient. But if you read the article, i even begun to write the article only because i found a PR that was left unnoticed, uncommented, even by their CI system (Expected — Waiting for status to be reported) for almost a year. It's not cool to get ghosted for a year! Thank you : |
- seba_dos1 3y ago
  > It's not cool to get ghosted for a year! And yet it's perfectly normal.
- twiss 3y ago
  I did read your article and did look at the other PR, but to be perfectly honest it looked a bit low-effort; the justification is simply "It just makes more sense that way", and the change looks very minor. (Which, of course I don't blame the PR author because they're not obligated to do anything, but at the same time I can't blame the maintainers as much for not merging it.) Your PR, on the other hand, looks great! The changes look well-reasoned and well-documented, though I don't know Calculator so I can't judge the code. But, don't be discouraged, neither by the lack of response so far, nor the criticism here. Hopefully they'll merge your PR, if not, I hope you'll find some other open source project you can contribute to, or you can start your own :) (I should've also said the positive part in my first comment, not just the negative part, apologies.)
taylodl 3y ago
Or it's a way to humble brag about yourself - hey! Look at me! I submitted a fix for Microsoft's calculator! Why haven't they accepted it yet?!
- Dhikshith12 3y ago
  Yes, you are absolutely right, but it's not humble bragging, it's real bragging, If i'm doing open-source, that too for a for-profit company, i want the bragging rights.

by twiss 3y ago

tylerritchie 3y ago

I strongly agree. I'm not convinced this submission is on-topic. 5 days without a human response is not great but it's not _awful_. Neither of the tagged reviewers have public commits in the last week, they may (hopefully are) both on vacation and enjoying some of the summer. I've had open-source PRs wait for a couple months before people were able to take a look, stuff happens, people have things come up and people have competing priorities. I really want to point out the timeline here: - drive-by PR was opened Sunday 8/6 at 8AM PT - CLA was agreed to Sunday 8/6 at 8:30AM PT - two... maintainers? were pinged Sunday 8/6 at 11:11AM PT - grumpy missive about Microsoft was written Friday 8/11 and posted to HN at 10:25AM PT 4 work days without a comment on a drive-by PR seems... fine?

doctorpangloss 3y ago

> Briefly glancing at the GitHub project, it has 11 open PRs and 1035 closed ones, I think those are pretty reasonable stats :) It's crazy to me that Microsoft's extremely asinine policy of closing real issues, because they made issue closing a metric, has directly played into real organic social media positive feelings for them.

yorwba 3y ago
PRs, not issues. And 800 of those 1035 are merged.
joshuamorton 3y ago
This is Pull Requests, not issues. And glancing through them, the majority of the closed ones are merged, and the majority of the unmerged ones are low effort/not real, or were closed with guidance on how to resubmit them better.

Alupis 3y ago

I don't know actually... Calculator is built into the Windows OS - a for-profit operating system developed by a for-profit corporation, and people expect it to work and be accurate. If there's bugs, it means it's impacting people and their calculations, and there aren't exactly any other easily accessible built-in alternatives. It's one thing to be FOSS, but open sourcing Calc.exe doesn't really make it a real FOSS project. It's more of a novelty for Microsoft it seems. I would expect PR's and Issues to alert a staff engineer at Microsoft who oversees public contributions. It's not like Calc is a huge project with thousands of contributors each year. Otherwise... it feels like just tossing the issue over the fence.

Dhikshith12 3y ago

Please forgive me with your mighty experience, I'm young, naive, and impatient, new to the open source, and the software industry, I received a lot of criticism for this article, and I'll learn to do better and be more patient. But if you read the article, i even begun to write the article only because i found a PR that was left unnoticed, uncommented, even by their CI system (Expected — Waiting for status to be reported) for almost a year. It's not cool to get ghosted for a year! Thank you : |

seba_dos1 3y ago
> It's not cool to get ghosted for a year! And yet it's perfectly normal.
twiss 3y ago
I did read your article and did look at the other PR, but to be perfectly honest it looked a bit low-effort; the justification is simply "It just makes more sense that way", and the change looks very minor. (Which, of course I don't blame the PR author because they're not obligated to do anything, but at the same time I can't blame the maintainers as much for not merging it.) Your PR, on the other hand, looks great! The changes look well-reasoned and well-documented, though I don't know Calculator so I can't judge the code. But, don't be discouraged, neither by the lack of response so far, nor the criticism here. Hopefully they'll merge your PR, if not, I hope you'll find some other open source project you can contribute to, or you can start your own :) (I should've also said the positive part in my first comment, not just the negative part, apologies.)

taylodl 3y ago

Or it's a way to humble brag about yourself - hey! Look at me! I submitted a fix for Microsoft's calculator! Why haven't they accepted it yet?!

Dhikshith12 3y ago
Yes, you are absolutely right, but it's not humble bragging, it's real bragging, If i'm doing open-source, that too for a for-profit company, i want the bragging rights.