Ask HN: What to do when open source project maintainer ignores my pull request?

2 points by AquaWeasel 1 year ago | 5 comments

Hello, I'm a computer enthusiast who recently started coding as a hobby.

Sometime mid 2024, I opened my first pull request to a popular open source project that I use daily. The patch adds a small feature to the software, which is rather trivial (~200 loc, and does not affect other features).

At first, the project maintainer actively reviewed my patch. But sometime later, he suddenly stopped responding to that pull request. After more than a month of inactivity, I posted a polite reminder, but to no avail. Two months passed, and there's still no reply.

I'm sure he was not being too busy to work on the project, since he was actively reviewing other pull request all the time.

Perhaps it's because of a noob question that I asked earlier in the pull request, which got him annoyed and blocked my GitHub account. But that also does not make sense, since he does reply my other comments under the pull request. Furthermore, I managed to figure out the answer myself and apologized, and that should not be a problem anymore.

Sometimes I even had nightmares about this. Once I dreamed about receiving an anonymous hate mail accusing me for wasting other developer's precious time.

I really wish to forget about the pull request, and perhaps it's better to close it myself. But I can't.

It's not that the patch itself is very important (I can apply the patch locally whenever the software releases a new version), but that I really want to know why my patch suddenly gets neglected.

Any suggestions what I should do?

gus_massa 1 year ago |

> Any suggestions what I should do?

Just forget it.

The maintainer has no obligation to merge (or review) the pull request. It's nice that they tell they will not merge it anyway.

From your comment, it looks like a long chain of questions and replies about the PR. It's usually not good. It's difficult to guess the problem, but my recommendation is to assume it will not be merged and forget it.

Perhaps the PR is in a direction the maintainer doesn't like. Perhaps it has to many problems to be solved. Perhaps the maintainer is a moron. It's difficult to know, but my guess is that further contact about this PR will not help.

> Perhaps it's because of a noob question that I asked earlier in the pull request

I've made a lot of stupid questions and mistakes. Everyone has made made a lot of stupid questions and mistakes. Don't worry too much.

> Furthermore, I managed to figure out the answer myself

Congratulations!

> The patch adds a small feature to the software, which is rather trivial (~200 loc, and does not affect other features).

I've just send a PR with +59 -7 (to another project, probably). I've send many that are even shorter. I think that 200 is too much, unless you are a regular contributor. There are a million of tiny details and it's easier to fix all of them when the PR is small. Once you understand the quirks and vision of the maintainer, you can try with longer ones.

timeon 1 year ago |

If there is other channel for the community like discrod - I would ping that maintainer there.

But anyway just keep calm and wait. They can review other PRs and not respond to your PR without any negative intent.

GianFabien 1 year ago |

Perhaps your "small feature" isn't seen to benefit many other users. You could look at the other changes that are being made to see what features are given priority.

You claim to have only recently started coding as a hobby. It might be possible that your coding doesn't conform to accepted practices by the maintainer.

Chalk it up to experience and move on. In the scheme of things it's a minor hiccup.

jjgreen 1 year ago |

Walk away and forget about it, life's too short to get stressed about that sort of thing.

ImPostingOnHN 1 year ago |

offer it as a patchfile for anyone who wants to merge it themselves, then forget about it, unless you are interested in maintaining a fork with your changes applied