Pin pointing the issue is way more than valuable than code. If you wrote a fix, you have analyzed the bug. The value is there, not in the fix. Sharing your fine analysis is the maximized contribution. Code is an optional bonus at most.
a code owner may choose a very different way of fixing things, even for what looks like a trivial fix.
There might be value in your bugfix, but maybe that value is not greater than the cost of reviewing and accepting it.
> Reviewing code fixes is strictly easier than coming up with them yourself.
This is completely false, for any sufficiently complex project. The fix might be a single line change, but the consequences might be far reaching.
> As a user-and-eveloper, why would I sink time into a project with such rules that put a barrier to improving my life with the software?
Please don't! You don't owe the project anything. The other side of that equation is that the project also doesn't owe you anything. As simple as.
Firefox and Chromium are running much larger teams, let alone the Linux kernel, that other people suggested as a model. Maybe they can afford accepting your contributions.
You state these things as if they are facts, but they are completely contrary to the lived experience of open source maintainers - not only my own and the TFA's but quite a large number of others who have shared similar pieces.
Would you mind sharing a link to one of the open source project you've been maintaining and reviewing contributions on for years that forms the basis of your expertise on this matter?
The real value we get from being open source is high quality bug reports and trust from our customers, not the external contributions. The only reason we welcome external contributors is marketing and generally being welcoming. If LLMs make this cost even higher for us then we might have to stop accepting external PRs.
Github is in my profile; I am nixpkgs committer for ~10 years (which is one of the most active projects on Github with 450000 merged PRs).
There is no way I could have possibly written and (pre-tested, to arrive at the eventual code submitted) all the code that I have reviewed.
From the other side, I have spent thousands of hours debugging and writing PRs to over 100 FOSS projects (e.g. glibc, busybox, util-linux, lz4, GHC and tens of Haskell packages, Jenkins, Chromium, GTK, Consul, OpenCV, Signal, many more).
Many of them are small or medium fixes ("drive-by fixes"), where you propose a PR, the owner reviews, says "great, thanks", and the bug gets fixed.
This is a fundamental workflow for open source work. The project gets free contributions and time investment outsourced to "the community" who fix its bugs, the developer-users/community get their problems fixed upstream, permanently.
This not possible for projects that don't have an easy way to submit code with low effort for both sides.
Accepting drive-by fixes is what clears up developer time and helps clear out the countless small issues in software.
If AI slop PRs are a problem, it seems better to establish clear rules and reject contributions that don't follow them with a single click, rather than banning developer contributions altogether. It seems to work acceptably for nixpkgs so far.
Exactly. You want others to change to fulfill your needs. Their priorities and needs are different. In this case, it was evaluated and found not to be useful (cost > benefits).
You're allowed, they'll just ignore it. Same as how sqlite and some other projects operate.
You can still submit a bug report and tell them exactly how you did it.
> Reviewing code fixes is strictly easier than coming up with them yourself.
Unless it's hundreds or thousands of AI slop PRs each pretending "here's a bug I fixed it"
Can you? The announcement says "There will not be a separate process for submitting patches by other means. We do not want to create a shadow contribution system through issues, comments, email, or forks".
So I, as a human, describe in prose which changes I made to e.g. 20 files?
How is that in the spirit of fighting LLM slop?
Also, if I can do that, the LLM slop contributers can also ... do that.
That you can still report bugs
> So I, as a human, describe in prose which changes I made to e.g. 20 files?
Rarely does a bug require a description of what needs to be done in 20 files
> Also, if I can do that, the LLM slop contributers can also ... do that.
Yes, they can. Yes, they will. And yes, it's a problem.