Comment by Etheryte | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Etheryte | Hacker News Reader

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My personal and very subjective opinion is that it's not my hill to die on. The majority of most things is not good, books, music, business plans, you name it. Open source contributions are the same — and that's okay. Much like I don't have a problem with people who write books I personally don't like, I don't take issue with people whose contributions don't align with what I think is good. I try to focus my energy on the ones that I find good, or at least the ones that look like they might end up being good. To perhaps put the same idea another way, if someone wants to put in the effort for making a change, it's their choice to do so. It is also their choice whether they take the time to do it well. If they didn't want to put in the work, it doesn't bother me, it's their time.

>The majority of most things is not good

"90% of everything is crap." -- Sturgeon's law [0]

The problem is that once someone has put in the time to create a PR, declining it is never going to feel good for the contributor.

Yes, they can maintain their own fork with their changes. But to be told "this doesn't work for our project," no matter how politely, is often emotionally interpreted as a form of rejection.

Which is what spawns the kind of rant above in the original link.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

I think that's a fine viewpoint, and one i take with many projects, and try to be clear upfront - IE "this is a thing i'm not going to spend a lot of energy on. If you give me stuff that works well, i'll integrate it. If not, i won't".

I would also agree you are going to get some amount of crap no matter what. But, i would say if you want this to be different, it's not entirely on other people. Even with the best of intent, you can't expect contributors or teams or processes to behave magically just because they should. You usually need to motivate/incentivize or train the behaviors you want, and iterate the processes and your approach until you are getting what you want.

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