Why I am tired of writing pull requests • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I am tired of writing pull requests

#31

Post by mikescar » Fri, Aug 24, 2012, 3:34 AM UTC

I'm newish to github and submitting pull requests but the OP's experience is very unfortunate and orthogonal to mine. People I don't know and who are better devs than I am have all been very nice.

I started using a small PHP framework plugin written by a guy who did everything right. I want to contribute eventually, so I asked him what his license choice will be and some questions that would hopefully keep our code in sync.

He was really polite and helpful, and wants to do an MIT-style license.

I forked his github project just to keep my pull requests and work stuff outside of that cleaner.

Not really sure what solution the OP is looking for. If your pull requests are universally rejected, perhaps you could change your approach.

Github is only the best software sharing platform anyone has devised thus far in our young discipline. You can't even message people privately, you can open a new Issue though.

Re: Why I am tired of writing pull requests

#32

Post by zquestz » Fri, Aug 24, 2012, 3:39 AM UTC

I have to say I haven't had this issue. Generally I accept quality pull requests to my projects within days. Pull requests I have sent to other projects have been merged in within a couple weeks at worst...

Perhaps in the future it would be worth discussing your changes with the developer ahead of time to see if that feature is something he wants in his core product. That could save you some time and effort in the future.

Re: Why I am tired of writing pull requests

#33

Post by graue » Fri, Aug 24, 2012, 3:43 AM UTC

jmathes wrote: post #23

I'm with you. I added parallel test execution to PHPUnit, which its maintainers have been promising since 2005. When I started writing it, they found me and encouraged me along. So I spent two weeks on it at 16 hours a day. When I was done, they invented reasons not to merge. When I was done fixing the reasons they had invented, they said they didn't want to merge it because they were going to write it themselves.

Sounds like a pretty bad case of NIH. Maybe you should fork? (Although, I haven't heard the other side of this, so that's assuming the project's code standards were followed, your code was good quality, etc.)

Re: Why I am tired of writing pull requests

#34

Post by aeturnum » Fri, Aug 24, 2012, 3:56 AM UTC

Rayne wrote: post #4

I will pass absolutely no judgement on you because I have no idea who you are, what you do, what the quality of your code/work is, but have you considered that maybe there is actually something wrong with the pull requests? With no references to examples if what you're talking about, it comes off as a bit of a temper tantrum. But that's just what it feels like, but I have no idea because I have nothing to look at to…

Even if he's misguided, he's trying to contribute. His description of someone finding a problem with his code could be written by someone who is a poor coder and doesn't understand why. However, it also doesn't sound like the people who rejected his pulls were very convincing at explaining why.

I think the point of the article is that the pull requests he's made came to nothing other than rejection. Nothing about the experience led him to believe he should make pull requests in the future. Even if he's a poor coder, I think that's a poor result and is worth talking about.

Re: Why I am tired of writing pull requests

#35

Post by zr52002 » Fri, Aug 24, 2012, 4:03 AM UTC

sciurus wrote: post #27

simanyay wrote: post #12

The first thing you should always do is create a ticket. There you can discuss if its worth spending time on a patch and what the best implementation could be. Pull requests that come up out of nowhere usually end up in the end of maintainers' queue. Or you can continue calling people who maintain free and open source projects in their spare time douchebags and neckbeards.

I cam here to say this. If something is going to take you more than 15 minutes to do, it's better to coordinate it with the project maintainers first. If it takes you less than 15 minutes, you didn't invest enough to be bitter if your code isn't accepted.

Or you can do that, proposing a trivial enhancement, and have

1) The maintainer tell you "that isn't the designed behavior" (no kidding it doesn't do that now, that's why I want to enhance it!)

2) It marked it as a duplicate of the last handful of people that wanted similar features

3) The ticket closed

I'm looking at you, jquery-ui

Re: Why I am tired of writing pull requests

#36

Post by spullara » Fri, Aug 24, 2012, 4:15 AM UTC

I usually give constructive feedback on pull requests I can't accept and then they either drop the request or fix it. Seems to be a pretty common pattern for projects in active development.

Re: Why I am tired of writing pull requests

#37

Post by cbsmith » Fri, Aug 24, 2012, 4:19 AM UTC

saurik wrote: post #25

From the Google Guava team, regarding the difficulty on the other end of people accepting random pull requests: https://plus.google.com/113026104107031516488/posts/ZRdtjTL1... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3691587

Yes. I ironically I've seen this contributor's sentiment shared internally in Google too (about many projects).

The real scaling challenge is in managing precisely this problem. It's not easy to solve.

Re: Why I am tired of writing pull requests

#38

Post by danso » Fri, Aug 24, 2012, 4:37 AM UTC

I haven't done enough pull requests to comment on the author's experiences...but one of my only was a trivial change...almost one of personal taste...to Twitter Bootstrap and I was disproportionately excited when it got acceptd. I'm assuming there's a disproportionate letdown for the inverse situation

Re: Why I am tired of writing pull requests

#39

Post by ericclemmons » Fri, Aug 24, 2012, 4:39 AM UTC

jmathes wrote: post #23

I'm with you. I added parallel test execution to PHPUnit, which its maintainers have been promising since 2005. When I started writing it, they found me and encouraged me along. So I spent two weeks on it at 16 hours a day. When I was done, they invented reasons not to merge. When I was done fixing the reasons they had invented, they said they didn't want to merge it because they were going to write it themselves.

Please link your fork! Heck, maybe Travis-CI will let PHP projects take advantage of it.

Re: Why I am tired of writing pull requests

#40

Post by snogglethorpe » Fri, Aug 24, 2012, 4:46 AM UTC

He describes a social problem which is very dependent on the actual maintainers, but blames it on the mechanism.

Yeah, some projects have prickly/uncooperative maintainers... so what? That's true regardless of the collaboration mechanism used, and there's no obvious reason why pull requests make this problem worse than other mechanisms.

Indeed, I would guess that pull requests make things better than many other methods, because they (1) make it much easier to review changes, (2) make it much easier for the submitter to update his changes in response to comments, (3) handily keep the discussion and patches all together in one easily accessible place, and (4) maintain a record of the request, helping to avoid the "forgot about it" problem that you get with e.g. patch requests on mailing lists ("Subject: ping" :).

Frankly, given the attitude in his rant, it seems pretty likely the problems he apparently has with maintainers aren't entirely the maintainers' fault...