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Discussing the issues, achieving consensus, making sure the fix fits the existing patterns and actually warrants the change, etc. These are and have always been
by geraneum 1mo ago
Discussing the issues, achieving consensus, making sure the fix fits the existing patterns and actually warrants the change, etc. These are and have always been a challenging part of contributing to open source. Typing code in your private fork that satisfies your “idiosyncratic fix” has always existed and been always the easier aspect of such changes. Chances are many of these changes would never be accepted into the repository anyway in the past.
- arjie 1mo agoCertainly, but there was motivation to do that in the past. My patch would probably line up with the rest of the code in the direction that they desired and the cost of fork maintenance would have pushed me to upstream in a way acceptable to maintainers.
- geraneum 1mo agoI find it hard to believe that this is the main motivation for most who contributors to OSS. Do you have a reference, research or poll that corroborate this? You’re vastly overestimating the value of these “fixes” that now go to private forks, because maintainers also have access to LLMs and can prompt, probably better than a drive by fix since they have better understanding and context of the codebase. Therefore I believe, in most cases, keeping those fixes to private forks is not a noticeable loss for the OSS projects.