Live data from Hacker News

A plea for better open source etiquette

quickpeople.wordpress.com

1–10 of 55 posts

Re: A plea for better open source etiquette

#2
I feel like a lot of these requests, especially in the "For a PR" section are things that only more seasoned developers have an appreciation for. Since OSS runs the gamut from bad-ass-mofos to beginners, I feel like you're going to get under a 50th percentile in most of these areas.

I agree that things need work, but sometimes it's hard to get to everything, especially if you're doing it for free in spare time.

Re: A plea for better open source etiquette

#4
post #2

I feel like a lot of these requests, especially in the "For a PR" section are things that only more seasoned developers have an appreciation for. Since OSS runs the gamut from bad-ass-mofos to beginners, I feel like you're going to get under a 50th percentile in most of these areas. I agree that things need work, but sometimes it's hard to get to everything, especially if you're doing it for free in spare time.

Some of it comes from the fact that a lot of "bad-ass-mofos" are beginners.

I know it's really not fair to group together people (not everyone's the same after all), but a lot of the etiquette issues seem to stem from a common lack of manners by and large.

Also of note: Times have changed. Once upon a time, most hackers tucked their shirts into their pants. Now some have stretched earlobes.

Re: A plea for better open source etiquette

#5
i've submitted some non-trivial PRs with tests to large projects that are still waiting for any form of acknowledgement after several months while other PRs and new commits are being closed around them. it's definitely annoying. maybe it's a github hellban :)

Re: A plea for better open source etiquette

#7
Gulp. I'm guilty of this. An iOS component I shared became quite popular.

Now I don't even do iOS development anymore, Xcode is out of date, I haven't even used ARC. Whenever people poke me, saying that the issues and PRs are piling up, I tell them my situation and ask what they suggest I do. Surprisingly, my responses get no response.

Perhaps I should just add some of the past contributors to the commit access list.

Re: A plea for better open source etiquette

#8
post #7

Gulp. I'm guilty of this. An iOS component I shared became quite popular. Now I don't even do iOS development anymore, Xcode is out of date, I haven't even used ARC. Whenever people poke me, saying that the issues and PRs are piling up, I tell them my situation and ask what they suggest I do. Surprisingly, my responses get no response. Perhaps I should just add some of the past contributors to the commit access list.

I kind of wish that on Github, there was a default "untested" branch bit that defaulted to on.

On the back end, this would aggregate all the commits applied from a head, and allow the maintainer and contributors to know beforehand if their stuff applied cleanly.

Eventually, if the project is abandoned, this untested "uberpatch" would end up being the defacto main branch.

There are probably very many horrible problems with this idea...

Re: A plea for better open source etiquette

#9
I think I tend to be rather obsessive about answering, replying and the occasional PR I tend to be really excited about. However I almost always want to tweak the PRs and I don't always have time. I have been guilty of letting some go for a few months, but I did acknowledge and discuss them right away.

Re: A plea for better open source etiquette

#10
post #7

Gulp. I'm guilty of this. An iOS component I shared became quite popular. Now I don't even do iOS development anymore, Xcode is out of date, I haven't even used ARC. Whenever people poke me, saying that the issues and PRs are piling up, I tell them my situation and ask what they suggest I do. Surprisingly, my responses get no response. Perhaps I should just add some of the past contributors to the commit access list.

A similar thing happened to me with youtube-dl. I handed the project over and gave commit access to a couple of contributors who are now doing an excellent job at keeping the program up to date.

Not long ago, this story was discussed here and makes a similar recommendation:

http://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html

Post reply on HN