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I'm still amazed at the number of developers who have a block around filing bugs or send out pull requests for the tools/libraries they use.

• username223 12y ago
  I'm not. Especially on larger projects, new contributors usually face something between indifference and hostility. After spending weeks in mailing list battles trying to contribute to a few projects, many people conclude it's not worth their time.
  • meesterdude 12y ago
    This. Even mildly popular library maintainers will be indifferent or hostile for even the most agreeable PR. Sometimes its just easier to fork and run your own version for this reason, but it makes contributing back to the community difficult.
  • emeraldd 12y ago
    That may be part of it, I don't usually worry with mailing lists. My general approach is to file a bug in the appropriate bug tracker documenting the issue I'm dealing with then if/when possible provide a patch for the problem. * I'm a coder not a politician ;)
  • serve_yay 12y ago
    Yeah, I don't think anything has ever come of the handful of issues I've filed with open source projects over the years. It's either silence or a WONTFIX/works as expected.
• sanderjd 12y ago
  It is a good deal of work to put together a merge-worthy pull request, and doing so is no guarantee of its inclusion, or even consideration. Just as an anecdote, I find it increasingly hard to justify the time to turn monkey-patches we've made to Rails (and its accompanying libraries) into pull requests and maintain them against changes upstream, when they often languish without comment from anyone with commit bit. I don't believe project maintainers have any sort of duty to keep on top of random pull requests, but it's pretty easy to lose the motivation to contribute.