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“the lesson I'm choosing to take from xz, as an oss maintainer, is that anyone trying to pressure or guilt me into doing something should immediately be told no, for security reasons” (crabby.fyi)

submitted 7 months ago by davel@lemmy.ml to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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[-] KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml 19 points 7 months ago

I've always been a fan of "pull requests welcome" when someone asks me for something.

[-] erwan@lemmy.ml 14 points 7 months ago

The problem is when people then open huge PRs and expect you to take time to review them, then eventually merge them.

Especially when it's something you don't want in your codebase because it introduce a big unnecessary "refactoring" or a feature that you don't want to have to maintain forever.

[-] TheDoctor@hexbear.net 3 points 7 months ago

I can’t imagine just opening a giant PR without having extensive contact and coordination with the maintainer. Almost any amount of incremental safe steps would be preferable to a giant PR, even with extensive communication. I once introduced fully strict typescript into a vanilla js codebase and it took dozens of small PRs to do so. It was made more complicated by the fact that it was a library, but still. The communication made the entire process smooth and let everyone be confident the changes were correct along the way. If I’d done it all at once without any coordination, it would have been faster for me, but at the cost of the maintainer’s sanity and time.

[-] erwan@lemmy.ml 2 points 7 months ago

The point is that saying "pull requests welcome" is still work for the maintainer, because now you have to have these discussions with potential contributors, sometimes explain them why you don't want to maintain the feature, or explain them why this PR is not the way you want...

So either way it's work, it's important to keep in mind before saying "just send a PR".