On Fri, Aug 22, 2025 at 01:34:16PM -0700, Otto Kekäläinen wrote: > On Sun, 17 Aug 2025 at 19:33, Theodore Ts'o <ty...@mit.edu> wrote: > > My point was that it takes a lot more effort, and time, to tell the > > submitter what to change, and then (a) wait for them to make the > > change, and (b) hope they make the change correctly. If they don't > > then you have to repeat, possily multiple times. > > Yes, I know it takes more effort to write to a contributor and wait > for them to finalize things compared to the receiver simply > highjacking the idea and finalizing it straight away. But please > consider the contributors' point of view too and how much effort > something took them. > > Let me share a story about something that happened this week. A person > I am mentoring had been planning to contribute to Debian for a long > time. I suggested they start small by for example fixing a bug in an > existing package (as doing a new upstream import or a completely new > package is a lot more work and has steeper learning curve). My mentee > found a bug in a package they use, the researched it well and found > the correct solution and posted it as a MR on the package on August > 7th. I reviewed it on August 8th and concluded that it looked correct > to me, but since it was an actively maintained package I asked the > maintainer to say the final word as pushing it directly without > coordination is not that collaborative, even though technically I > could have done it as this was a package in /debian/ namespace on > Salsa. > > On August 19th the maintainer closed the MR. He thanked the submitter > for it but decided that merging or was too much effort after he did > other changes on the main branch, so he just went ahead and did the > exact same change himself to save time/effort for himself. > > End result is that this new contributor did not get his name in the > git commit log, his Salsa profile does not show that he has any > successfully merged MRs (even thought he change was fully correct and > identical to what the maintainer did), the contributor won't find his > name in the changelog nor get anything accumulated at > https://contributors.debian.org/contributor/<name>. > > So all the effort the submitter did - and also me as mentor - was in > vain. This is not the end of the world, but I wanted to share it as an > anecdote of the new contributor experience.
I find it quite interesting that you would qualify this as a wasted effort on the mentee's part and your own. This implies that the primary goal when opening the MR was getting the person's name into the Debian changelog / git log, not improving Debian or gaining experience in how to contribute. So it sounds to me like your perception of the outcome was heavily influenced by the initial framing. With that said, I fully appreciate that visibility is currency when it comes to FLOSS and I agree with Jonas that maintainers should credit contributors even if not merging their changes exactly as proposed. See [1] for a recent example of me going out of my way to ensure that the contributor gets full credit for their work. [1] https://salsa.debian.org/libvirt-team/libvirt/-/merge_requests/274 -- Andrea Bolognani <e...@kiyuko.org> Resistance is futile, you will be garbage collected.
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