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Contributing to Open Source projects

brad.livejournal.com

21–23 of 23 posts

Re: Contributing to Open Source projects

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even for people git-aware, there's a bit more involved. Most people are probably happy to get patch submissions, but there's some work involved in accepting them. Generally, project owners want to see a test accompany any change to demonstrate that a bug was fixed or that new behavior does what's claimed. There may also be coding standards to follow, and (ideally) some documentation for new code. If you omit these th…

Generally, project owners want to see a test accompany any change to demonstrate that a bug was fixed or that new behavior does what's claimed. There may also be coding standards to follow, and (ideally) some documentation for new code. If the project owner really wants the patch, they will fix these details themselves. In my experience this is how project owners reject patches that they don't want; make the submitte…

Seriously? I'd much rather get a potential repeated contributor who can follow my style than clean it up without asking him to do it. Double for tests: I frequently can't figure out exactly what the best regression test will be and the contributor needs to make it himself (though that may be a special case of my VCS work). Pull requests actively make commenting on a patch harder than a patchbomb in email. The fork queue (imnsho) is even worse, as I've had people just assume I'll see it and just take it from the fork queue page.

Feel free to write me off as a cranky old fart - I've been doing OSS long enough to remember Subversion as a wonderful thing on the horizon and the pure joy of its relative speed. This is all based on my mostly-poor experiences with GH preventing a community domain forming by causing nobody to talk outside of their commit messages, which is a huge loss.

Re: Contributing to Open Source projects

#22
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why traffic has stopped on the linux kernel mailing list, despite being long time users of git? Nope. All serious open source projects have some sort of discussion area. Even github lets you comment on commits, but that's not quite as convenient to read for most people as a publicly visible mailing list/forum/whatever. Git is a nice tool, but you can't take things to extremes. It is not a substitute for actu…

When your project's size warrants it, you can switch from pull requests to an off-site mailing list. But most projects never get there, and so pull requests are quite useful for the long tail. I remember back in the sourceforge day, most projects died before they ever got a mailing list, CVS account, web page, wiki, bug tracker, ..., all setup. Now, reasonable defaults are provided for you, and you can focus on writi…

github is without doubt an improvement over SF, and makes it easier to contribute to smaller projects.

> I remember back in the sourceforge day, most projects died before they ever got a mailing list, CVS account, web page, wiki, bug tracker, ..., all setup.

What happened a lot is that people thought they were going to do some great open source project, registered the project, then never did anything with it. This can happen anywhere, really, although it's probably less prominent on github, because a repository with nothing in it is pretty ridiculous.

Also, it's amazingly easy to set up a Google Group, even though they have some known issues.

Anyway, where I'm going with this is merely that putting it on github does not make open source magically 'work', and people need to pay attention to the human (communication, etc...) side of things too. Github is an improvement in many ways.

Re: Contributing to Open Source projects

#23
post #2

Github solved this problem. Everyone knows how to contribute to a Github project. Click the fork button, commit your patch, send pull request.

I don't think Github solved it. Many open source projects don't use Github. Github has made great leeway in the right direction but its not the end.

leeway -> headway?
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