Why I am tired of writing pull requests

Link to your GH profile?

I've written dozens of pull requests and most of them either get merged, or I get a concise explaination about why they're not being merged.

probably 3/5 I have to go through a few iterations of hack and rebase before they go upstream. I'm fine with this.

With some more background maybe we can offer feedback about why your code isn't making it upstream?

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 form an opinion.

That's really too bad. For the record, I've written a couple hundred pull requests - no really! - and those that haven't been accepted have been because

  - The project is no longer maintained (I fork or rewrite better in this case)
  - I was actually doing it wrong
  - My pull didn't have tests and that was the convention (gotta respect conventions)
  - The author wished to keep my feature out for some random reason, but either gave me a hook or showed me how to override behavior in a clean way.

When the developer refuses to pull for not one of these reasons, it's usually because they don't have time. Which is fine, I totally understand that. I do that myself - I currently have 17 open PRs that I've sent and 20 from others in projects I maintain - so that's expected.

I would also say that when a PR isn't merged because the developer wants to write it himself, it's probably a stylistic issue and your implementation doesn't fit in with his vision for the project. You can't just pull in every request that comes by, otherwise the code becomes a complete shit-show and then debugging, maintaining, and extending it is a nightmare. I can personally attest to this, having committed this faux pas myself.

Some projects are more receptive to pulls from authors outside the core team than others. Namely, large projects in use by thousands of people.

Most library authors truly appreciate these kinds of pull requests.

Bitching about pull requests in such a generalized way is destructive behavior and having it up-voted here surely isn't good for many of the impressionable people that read news here.

Unless I'm confused, aren't you also the author of that gist?

https://gist.github.com/3444052 your names on that one.