[kwlug-disc] FLOSS contributions

[Paul Nijjar]

That is helpful information. Thank you! Now I have more questions:

How easy is it for potential contributors to pick up the right way to
make useful contributions? Are the procedures necessary to complete
the other 80% of the job well understood/documented, or are they only
in the heads of the developers?

How much patience/energy do the developers have towards handholding
potential contributors through completing the other 80% of the work? 

How feasible is it for outsiders (who are neither core developers nor
the people proposing features) to do this kind of cleanup work? Does
this stuff require a lot of in-depth knowledge of the project, or is
it rote enough that somebody who is not expert enough to code a new
feature can do the cleanup?

- Paul 


On Tue, Aug 16, 2016 at 08:45:32PM -0400, Marius Kintel wrote:
> I’m on the other side - I run an Open Source project and take contributions :)
> 

> The main challenge I see from my contributors and
> almost-contributors is that contributing code is a lot harder and a
> lot more time consuming than people think. Lots of Open Source
> projects (including mine) doesn’t have the luxury of allocating lots
> of time to clean up code properly, so most contributions will have
> to face a certain degree of refactoring, testing and bug hunting and
> -fixing. ..and that’s before the developer team even agrees that the
> contributed feature is something we want to accept and take
> responsibility for in the future.

> 
> In general I see a lot of will towards implementing features, but
> the pre- and post cleanup and testing is not something that’s very
> rewarding to most people and feature pull requests thus tends to sit
> around for a while waiting for someone to get time to do the
> remaining 80% of the job..

> 
>  -Marius
>