

8 (new) steps for fixing other people’s code - BummerCloud
http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/31584205500/8-new-steps-for-fixing-other-peoples-code

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humbledrone
I feel like a really important step is missing between steps 2 and 3: open an
issue about the changes you'd like to make, and get feedback from the project
maintainers. Unless you are just fixing an extremely obvious and simple bug,
it is a really bad idea to just write up a pull request without getting an
"I'd consider merging that" from a maintainer.

There are plenty of reasons that a pull request might get rejected. Perhaps a
maintainer has already written some similar code and just hasn't merged it
into a public branch. Maybe the approach you took isn't in line with the
maintainer's vision. Maybe they just simply don't want to add the feature you
want.

Randomly sending pull requests out of the blue is a good way to waste time and
become frustrated. It's not very fun to write a bunch of code and have the
maintainer just drop it on the floor.

