Maude Summerside wrote: > > > On 2022-09-14 21:45, Michael Stone wrote: > > On Wed, Sep 14, 2022 at 11:16:00PM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote: > >> I'll be brutally honest: being accused of "possibly malicious" > >> unwilligness is *not* a great way to convince overstretched volunteers > >> to spend their time on issues. > > > > Especially when it's an ongoing pattern of discourse. > > > > I think there's many barrier that discourage people from wanting to > contribute to many project. I feel some developer use the community as > unpaid beta tester but don't go further into accepting contribution. > > For sure, having managed some project, I have to say that it's hard to > accept contribution that will add new functions to as software when > these come from a unknown contributor. Not because of being scared of > malicious intent (unless the person is really paranoid but that's > another story). Simply because adding a new function means having to > support it's ongoing development and there's no guarantee that the > contributor will do so. Same goes on for code contributed that needs > refactoring, that are badly documented, etc. But all this need some good > social behavior from the project owner/manager.
I quite like the approach taken by Espen Jurgensen, project owner of Owntone (formerly forked-daapd). If a feature is requested and he thinks he might want to use it, he brings it in. If he doesn't see a point for his own usage but thinks that other people might want it, he asks the contributor to maintain a fork for a few months. The initial bugs get worked out by someone who cares about it, and then a pull request can be made to bring it back to the main branch. -dsr-
