Ask HN: How many don't want others to contribute to their open source projects?

4 points by ipaddr 3y ago ↗ HN

I've created a project posted on github and I'm getting prs for the first time. I should probably feel great but part of me doesn't really want to accept any changes. In one way my role moves reviewing which is not really why I started the project and feels like work. But more importantly I lose control and maybe a bit of credit. Being able to say I did everything feels cleaner than 98.7% and with only my changes I feel more free to introduce any new feature or refactor with regard to others who may be working under old assumptions. Has anyone felt similiar?

4 comments

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fsckboy 3y ago ↗

if the changes are high quality, wouldn't it be a pleasure to accept them? don't you already have more ideas yourself than you have time to implement? Many authors get fed up with being asked to add features, and many projects die from lack of attention, I'd say you're doing something right!

If Linus T could still say that he wrote 100% of Linux, he'd be talking to about 10 people.

pestatije 3y ago ↗

Yeah, you loose control, the code doesn't feel yours anymore, and it's difficult to track changes. In the end i just let it go in the hands of other people

rikroots 3y ago ↗

I would love to build a community of developers and contributors on GitHub around my project - who doesn't want to be a Benevolent Dictator for Life? But I can relate to how you feel - on the one occasion when someone created a PR contribution my reaction was to panic, and then copy the (very minor) changes manually over to my current working branch and merge that way.

I expect I've (accidentally? subconsciously?) built barriers to contributions over the years. An idiosyncratic coding style probably makes it more difficult for others to figure out what's going on in the code - especially as I've never written a coding style guide for the project. The rudimentary toolchain around the project - in particular the lack of unit tests to give others confidence in their PR's quality - certainly doesn't help. Writing a Contributor's guide has been on my to-do list for at least 5 years; it's so easy for me to find an excuse to do the work "tomorrow" (which never comes.

And the stupid thing is that this lack of collaboration seriously damages my project. When devs look around for a canvas library to add to their projects, they care a lot about the community surrounding that library - why risk going with a solo-dev library where there's no guarantee that the library won't be abandoned tomorrow? I honestly don't blame them for choosing to go with the competition ... however sad it makes me feel.

WallyFunk 3y ago ↗

I consider myself a novice Git user. I can debug a merge conflict okay, but don't know the more esoteric functions like `blame` and others. I merged someone's code into mine on GitHub the other day, and they were mixing spaces with tabs in the code, and I'm a tabs-only coder, so I resorted to simple issue-filing where people want x feature or y bug to be fixed, and I fix it myself, rather than weird merges happening.