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It is great if you can get the right people. But if you have someone who just needs one bugfix/feature so they can get on with their own thing, they are rarely the right people.

The person in this case clearly want to contribute, so spending time on them may be worth it in the long run.




> It is great if you can get the right people. But if you have someone who just needs one bugfix/feature so they can get on with their own thing, they are rarely the right people.

I think Linus' point is you never know. If you shot down MRs from other people, I am not at all surprised that you have not found the "right" people. I have found bugs in other projects with other projects. I will poke around at the source, and to see if I can fix it, but I also look at the MRs. If I see that sort of hostility towards MRs, I just don't bother.

On the other hand, with the projects I maintain, I have found that encouraging folks to submit their own MRs, even if it costs me more time to fix up their patches, more often than not, encourages them to help out more, test/report bugs with useful debugging more, and even contribute more (in either code or in the community)!


You may have had better luck than me.

It always turns out something like:

"Yes, please make that change, but don't do that refactoring/reordering/shuffling whitespace thing you suggested."

Change comes in, it is the actual wanted stuff, on top of refactoring/reordering/shuffling whitespace thing in the same PR.

I always try to be civil, but I can't deny that there is a possibility that some snark between the lines in my reaction may have scared them away.




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