alt Hacker NewsI've been on both ends of this.
As the maintainer of ghidra-delinker-extension, whenever I get a non-trivial PR (like adding an object file format or ISA analyzer) I'm happy that it happens. It also means that I get to install a toolchain, maybe learn how to use it (MSVC...), figure out all of the nonsense and undocumented bullshit in it (COFF...), write byte-perfect roundtrip parser/serializer plus tests inside binary-file-toolkit if necessary, prepare golden Ghidra databases, write the unit tests for them, make sure that the delinked stuff when relinked actually works, have it pass my standards quality plus the linter and have a clean Git history.
I usually find it easier to take their branch, do all of that work myself (attributing authorship to commits whenever appropriate), push it to the master branch and close the PR than puppeteering someone halfway across the globe through GitHub comments into doing all of that for me.
Conversely, at work I implemented support for PKCS#7 certificate chains inside of Mbed-TLS and diligently submitted PRs upstream. They were correct, commented, documented, tested, everything was spotless to the implicit admission of one of the developers. It's still open today (with merge conflicts naturally) and there are like five open PRs for the exact same feature.
When I see this, I'm not going to insist, I'll move on to my next Jira task.
Replies
> I usually find it easier to take their branch, do all of that work myself (attributing authorship to commits whenever appropriate), push it to the master branch and close the PR than puppeteering someone halfway across the globe through GitHub comments into doing all of that for me.
My most negative experiences with free and open source contributions have been like that. The one maintainer who engaged with me until my patches got into master was the best experience I ever had contributing to open source software to this day.
Pretty sad that people see engaging with other developers as "puppeteering someone halfway across the globe through GitHub comments"...
> push it to the master branch and close the PR than puppeteering someone halfway across the globe through GitHub comments into doing all of that for me
While I understand the sentiment I am glad I got into open source more than fifteen years ago, because it was maintainers “puppeteering” me that taught me a lot of the different processes involved in each project that would be hard to learn by myself later.