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> Skin in the game

In the title but never elaborated on. (Kind of like CDO.[1])

Anyone who makes an effort has skin in the game. Unless your PR was made by ChatGPT or you are sending out spam PRs, you have skin in the game. (Of course there’s an asymmetry here since the maintainer has to deal with this spam. But isn’t it like email? Eventually with enough spam it will be tolerated to by-default ignore solicitations based on heuristics.)

Someone can spend a week on a PR and get immediately rejected because the maintainer liked neither the approach nor the feature. Okay but wait, you say, why didn’t you just ask about the design before you made the PR? Because some projects will politely say “send patches” if you first do a preliminary feeler-inquiry. They won’t even tell you what the chances of such a change being accepted and will just give you a generic “we will judge it on its merit and usefulness”.[2]

> In a sense this is a generic rant about missing the “good old times” (that probably never were), where people talked to each other eye to eye.

They’re simulating eye-to-eye/real life interactions. In real life I can be eight different people under my real name because physical interactions are localized. On the public Internet, under the same name, everything is in the same place.

And the Internet has gotten more hostile over the decades.

[1] https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2024/3/26/rust-cdo/

[2] I have a particular project in mind




Most open source projects have not just the final source published, but also all communication for patches, features and their relevant discussion.

That could be on GitHub, a traditional mailing list, or some other hosting platform.

You can’t tell in advance how your work will be received, but you can empirically tell how others work has been received. And even compare the communication styles.

And it’s not rocket science that well reasoned patches, with tests, splitting out separate commits, explaining the reason for the change would be better received than a typo laden one-liner, “I needz it”.

It’s up to the submitter to match the flow of the project.


> And it’s not rocket science that well reasoned patches, with tests, splitting out separate commits, explaining the reason for the change would be better received than a typo laden one-liner, “I needz it”.

I said makes an effort.

You can implement a novel feature (and well) and get it rejected.


I’m saying without writing any code I can already tell, within a reasonable level of confidence, if a patch would be accepted by looking through past contributions. You’re not working in a vacuum.




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