Ask HN: How to say no to a GitHub issue feature request?

yea you can say fuck off

well politically correct answer is to fork off

they should fork it instead haha

> This does not mean you actually will merge any PR for said future, should they ever materialize.

If you don’t intend to merge the feature, you should not say that patches are welcome, that’s an asshole move.

If you’re not sure, say that and that they can open a pr but you can’t make any promise.

If you’re not interested in the feature and are not willing to maintain it, say that as well.

If you don't see that the feature would fit your vision of the codebase then just tell them that.

If you think it is a useful feature tell him that you currently don't have time to implement it yourself but a PR is welcome.

Often people only want that there issue is tracked, so to avoid conflict and just do nothing just tell them that it goes into the backlog of future features to be considered ;)

Fair point. Agreed.

This sounds like a problem you will face many times in the future and therefore you may benefit from finding a solution that will solve for both this request and all similar future requests. For example, instead of writing any customised response, you could write a blog post / make a webpage that explains your approach to these types of request and then simply link to it in a reply. Then every time this comes up you can simply paste in “Thank you for your request. Please see [URL]”.

I find doing this type of thing (creating nice canned responses, creating reusable answers) nearly always pays off in the medium and long term and find that it’s much easier to put the effort into a response knowing that you’ll get long lived value from it vs it just being useful for one person.

Similarly, I often find others have done similar and if their thoughts align with mine I don’t need to write the answer myself but instead can refer to someone else’s blog post etc.