Edit: Thanks for your kind comments on disabling contributions. I’m aware of the possibility, this is just a meme.
Contributions in open source projects are great, needed and make the world a better place after all. Therefore they should be declined politely, optionally by giving a reason.
I hereby inform you that I will no longer accept contributions to this post /s.
I never understand people rejecting free improvements on FOSS projects.
EDIT: Y’all, It’s not like I cannot comprehend why they do it. Please stop trying to explain it to me. When I said “I don’t understand”, I meant the psyche of the character that does that. I personally do FOSS to improve the world and collaborate with others that do so as well. I will never get people who do FOSS and then get salty about people liking it too much.
I never understand people rejecting free feedback on social media posts.
Apart from bad quality code, the PR might not fit the vision the owner has in mind for the project. Improvements are subjective.
Sure, but that’s not what the meme implies.
Verifying that the code doesn’t contain regressions, bugs, or vulnerabilities, that it doesn’t conflict with whatever the owner is actively developing privately, in addition to making sure it wasn’t vomited out by a goddamn clanker, is a huge burden on a solo developer. They are free to decide whether to take on this responsibility.
Every bit of code a maintainer accepts becomes their responsibility to maintain. Considering that half the time „improvements” don’t even have tests to help maintaining them, feel free to maintain your own fork.
Sure, one can request those PRs to add those tests before merging.
Don’t get me wrong, I can understand why someone wants to just share without collaborating, but I don’t get why they would publish in a collaborative environment, and then make memes about people trying to collaborate with them.
Personally, as someone writing FOSS for a while now, I’m always happy to get anyone helping out and get demotivated when nobody cares. Being actively hostile to actual code contributors, is just fucking bizarre to me.
While I do agree GitHub is a place where people collaborate, it’s also a pretty handy place to store stuff without having to host your own. If the project doesn’t invite people to contribute, don’t expect a polite response forever. It’s like stopping your neighbor on the street corner to tell them they should paint their house white for the thermal benefits, yeah people collaborate on the street, yeah you are right, it’s their house though.
Github provides ways to both display code just as is (archive mode) and to also disable issues and auto-close all PRs with a message.
Is archive mode the appropriate tool for this? I would assume that’s for when a repo is no longer receiving any updates from anyone, not just when the owner doesn’t want others contributing.
I never understand people who don’t install every free FOSS software offered to them on their PC.
Why would someone take every contribution to their FOSS project? It makes no sense to take a contribution doesn’t help the project owner’s vision of the project.
Not everything sent in PR is an improvement from everyone pov though. It might be an improvement for the contributor of a new feature they might be the only one to ever use, while it adds maintenance burden for you, more dependencies, risks of bugs etc for the community, which you have to balance somehow. Plus you might have a view on how to do things properly on your project, which needs to be communicated to contributors, which is additional work you might not have time for, especially if this is just some small side project.
This is not what the meme implies. This is rejecting all PR, regardless of quality or fit. That, I don’t get.
It’s an exaggeration for the purposes of humor. Its not that deep.
It’s meant as a portfolio and I don’t want to risk someone mistaking some contribution for my own work.
I don’t actually intend to put any time into maintaining it, but you are free to fork it if you want that responsibility.
Your linting is lousy. It causes my eyes much pain.
So disable prs then.
Why don’t these get read only and archived then? Seems like there’s a mechanism for this already?
Because maybe one day someone will send me something useful. Also I like the attention.
I’d probably reject PRs into my FOSS projects, because the aim is to put the code out there for other people to see and do what they want with it. I’m expressing myself, and sharing what I made; I’m not setting up a tentpole project for others to pitch in and take over on, and start managing their contributions and collaborate with them.
If they want to take the code and do something with it, great. I don’t want to be involved in their endeavour.
Fork it, prefix it with open, free, or libre and take the PR from the upstream and ass it to yours after messaging the contributor.