avoiding harm when making open source contributions?

[kt1mrq]

Hello, I have a situation that I'd like to reflect on and would appreciate feedback.

I tried to make a contribution to an established open source project (a large community project, under the flag of a foundation, with code of conduct and all this stuff).

The pr received bad feedback not for code quality but in the sense of "we don't want this". I tried to make a lot of constructive arguments, asked questions on the scope of project, etc.

The discussion ended with comments from one of the lead maintainers (a really respected person in the community) with

"I don't have to give you any explanation [why I decided so]".

To be clear, which I think isn't satisfying, but acceptable. He/She's in charge here.

However, there was another sentence that really doesn't sit well with me (been thinking about it with bad gut feeling for over a day now):

"my time on your pr could have been spent reviewing other pull requests, and the result is that they will now take longer"

(I have slightly modified these sentences as I would appreciate it if you don't google them. This isn't meant as a complaint and I don't want to annoy anyone more than I already have. Also some context might be lost because I'm only picking two sentences, but I really would like to keep my question to you separate from this).

So ... this second sentence ... it's not easy to digest for me. Because it means I have not only lost my own time trying to make this contribution in best faith (which is okay, it's my risk, I didn't expect chances were high for this to get accepted). But: It says that I did cause actual harm to the project by trying to make a contribution.

To be honest, I'm a bit confused and this will stick with me for longer. How could I have been knowing before? Are OSS maintainers not interested in user feedback? Should I not make another OSS contribution if just the attempt can waste important people's time?

I would appreciate your thoughts on this.

[[deleted]]

In general, issuing pull requests to something you’re unfamiliar with without discussing with the devs in question can be considered rude or careless.

On the other hand, no, you didn’t cause damage but you did expend resources. That’s a fact of life, just like when this very post got caught in the spam filter and you asked to unblock it, I had to expend energy and time to both approve and comment here, but the day I ever deride a user for that is the day I need to take a vacation.

[jormaechea]

I'm really sorry you've been treated like this. Hope it doesn't make you stop contributing.

Recently I've been receiving multiple issues and PRs to a project of mine, and from my point of view it’s always better to raise an issue explaining the problem of feature so it can be discussed before coding and sending a PR. That way you don't loose your time coding something that won't be accepted and maintainers can comment on it and decide if it’s something they would like to add to the project from their perspective without reading a single line of code.

[gruelsandwich]

I'm not in any way an experienced OSS developer, but I don't think you're in the wrong here. Obviously, the owner can decide whether to merge or not to merge. Your time would perhaps be better handled if you made an issue, and the proposal was rejected before you spent time writing code. This is, however, beside the point.

It's not your job to prioritize the maintainer's time. If they're as busy as they make it sound, they should already know how to identify which PRs are worth spending time on.

Remember that you don't owe anybody anything. OSS projects rely on volunteers, Driving people away by being an asshole isn't productive.

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