[kwlug-disc] FLOSS contributions

[Marius Kintel]

I’m on the other side - I run an Open Source project and take contributions :)

The main challenge I see from my contributors and almost-contributors is that contributing code is a lot harder and a lot more time consuming than people think. Lots of Open Source projects (including mine) doesn’t have the luxury of allocating lots of time to clean up code properly, so most contributions will have to face a certain degree of refactoring, testing and bug hunting and -fixing. ..and that’s before the developer team even agrees that the contributed feature is something we want to accept and take responsibility for in the future.

In general I see a lot of will towards implementing features, but the pre- and post cleanup and testing is not something that’s very rewarding to most people and feature pull requests thus tends to sit around for a while waiting for someone to get time to do the remaining 80% of the job..

 -Marius

> On Aug 16, 2016, at 02:00, Paul Nijjar via kwlug-disc <kwlug-disc at kwlug.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> Who here contributes to FLOSS projects? In what ways do you
> contribute? What were the biggest barriers you faced in getting
> started?
> 
> Who has had intentions of contributing to open source, but been
> stymied? What were the roadblocks?
> 
> Would you be interested in helping others get up to speed
> in making contributions?
> 
> Who here speaks multiple (human) languages? Have you ever considered
> translating software? Have you ever done so? What level of technical
> expertise is required to do so?
> 
> I'm, um, asking for a friend.
> 
> - Paul
> 
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