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Discussion on: What are some blockers for you on contributing to open source projects?

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Peter Harrison

I've had this as well. When you try and contribute to solve a problem in the code, but the maintainer has silently decided not to work on it any more. I ended up fixing a bug that was in the bug tracker. There was no way to commit except save the patch against the bug. There is stayed without being committed or even reviewed. The means the last version was two years old. You are left building your project against your internal fork. At no point did the maintainer offer to hand it off to people who continued to actively develop against it.

My other pet peave is the way projects expect their users to log into their bug tracking system in order to report a defect. Several times I've found issues, tried to report them, only to give up.

Another variant of this problem is having defects closed as 'won't fix', or 'duplicate', only to find a stream of people reporting the same issue over years. Showing disinterest in users issues is a good way to also discourage deeper involvement such as contributions.