I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know

I was introduced to open source software in 1996 and have been a huge advocate since. About five years ago, I decided to quit my job and, shortly thereafter, went out in search of a project I could contribute to in my spare time (which was now much more abundant).

I quickly discovered that a particular piece of software I used daily wasn't really being maintained all that well, despite the fact that there were several contributors listed on its home page. A few dozen bugs reports (some even including patches!) had come in, yet only a few had even been acknowledged.

This seemed like exactly the type of project I was looking for -- something that I used every day and could help improve. I sent an e-mail to the developers stating that I was going to be devoting some time to the project, sending patches in for the bugs, etc., and asking if there was "anything I should know" before jumping in. I spent a lot of time reviewing the previous discussions on the mailing lists, examining their previous commits to see how they did things, and so on.

One of the developers finally replied -- about a week later -- and asked for my SSH key. I sent it to him and he quickly gave me commit access, thanked me for the assistance, yadda yadda.

I closed out umpteen bugs, responded to previously unanswered messages on the mailing lists, and sent patches to the developers list asking for feedback before I committed anything. Having received no responses, eventually I committed all the changes and pushed them into the master branch. Questions that I had to the other developers went unanswered, just like all the previous bug reports and user-submitted patches had.

After a while, I just quit spending any time on it. Perhaps a month after my latest fix, I look at my e-mail one day to see a flood of notification e-mails about commits. The lead developer had reverted every single commit I had made. I was looking for -- expecting -- some explanation but never received one, even after I finally directly asked, "WTF did I do wrong!?".

Nothing. No response, to this day. I eventually said "fuck it", deleted my private key, unsubscribed from the lists, and moved on. I just looked and there are still bugs open today that were open back then.

The sad part is that this piece of software is fairly widespread and a part of all of the major Linux distributions, installed by default on many of them. I think there's been one, maybe two, "releases" in the last five years.

What a small world, I worked with Greg at CashStar where he started the fork of django-money. I still remember the conversation we had in a meeting if we should fork the project or push our PR upstream to fix the issues we found. I'm glad our upstream PR started a trend to keep the library going. This is why I like open source, when you no longer need something you can hand it off to someone else who can take over, and let the code live on.

It was a project that I didn't give a lot of love, and hence just gave them commit rights. It was about a year later before I looked again, by which time they had done far too much work on top of their non-cross-platform bits for me to revert.

I still didn't use the project myself; and didn't care enough to fix it, so I just removed myself.

I'm not the parent, but I've been burned in the same way. In an ideal world, yes - that would be the right way to handle the situation. In a company you'd want to do that, and probably give the programmer a mentor who can do code reviews and whatnot.

Unfortunately thats:

- Thats a complicated conversation to have at the best of times. With volunteers over the internet its much harder to organise 1-on-1s.

- A huge time sink. Usually I could make the changes themselves in less time than it would take me to explain the changes to a junior developer. Its especially hard to justify for projects I have in maintenance mode, where I don't want to spend time working on project features at all. Long term hopefully the time investment will pay off, but they'll probably disappear long before then.

- Honestly, its also not that much fun. I contribute to opensource projects because I like making things. Managing people doesn't rub that itch.

I'm not saying I have a better solution. But faced with a stream of mediocre PRs from an enthusiastic new contributor that you don't have time to review, what do you do? Abandoning the project to the new contributor sounds pretty reasonable to me.

Wow, talk about some passive-aggressive behavior on the devs' part! I think there are hazards on projects where nothing seems to be happening, like you described, and others that are fairly active. At least with the active projects, you can usually get a feel for how you might be received by reading the mailing lists. I hope it didn't put you off looking for another project to help.