When it doesn’t work, you get helpful bug reports *
That is people helping you
I’ve heard some people take the approach of “merge everything”. Whatever people contribute, merge it. People like to feel like their time is valuable, and that their work is valued.
You can follow up the merge with polish or tweaks but if you merge contributions you’re more likely to see more.
XZ says thank you.
😆 I don’t think you’re supposed to take it literally. And it’s advice for everyone’s pet open source projects that no one else ever seems to contribute to, not really good advice for software that holds up civilization.
pet open source projects that no one else ever seems to contribute to, not […] software that holds up civilization
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I see where you came from.
There are people submitting code with wrong licenses or no attribution. There are people just submitting for the sake of submitting - I dare github profiles for this. There are people who could need some feedback on their code, so that future contributions have better quality.
And it can be very burdensome for a maintainer, assuming he maintains within its free time, to perfectly communicate and elaborate on each contribution.
Also, maybe the project has a feature freeze because in the aimed architecture the same solution would be implemented externally.
Its just not that simple and people generalizing or concluding too fast are mostlikely in the wrong. Bad PR travles faster and further though.
Don’t implement a user’s stupid idea, they fork the repo and somehow the fork gets more stars…
Just archive it and take up farming.
What project are you referring to?
I’ve a noob user so over the year or so I’ve been learning to use git and read errors. This week I made my first PR patching a bug and it broke because I patched it in the wrong place, however, the project owner saw what I was doing and patched it himself. I’m trying my best here, hopefully I can gain enough experience to help out with more projects.
OpenSource is only as good as an active community it has, bad if not and with an lazy dev. FOSS without an update since years is risky crap.
A good sign you’re hostile to potential contributors. Maybe have a clear readme that gets them a working dev environment in a command or two. Try not to shit on people in issues
I taught myself programming and I also help open source projects with documentation and translation. Gonna be a bit until I can really make PRs with code but slowly working towards it.
