Open source Maintainers: How do you deal with feature requests?

Patrick Ziegler — Tue, 14 Aug 2018 16:44:10 +0000

I'm a co-maintainer of a fairly popular open source project in its space and we get lots of feature requests and I'm not always sure what to do with them. For some, I can clearly see the merits and they're also something, I'd like to see in the project but just haven't thought of and I'll happily add them to our 'Feature Requests' github project. For others I can clearly say that it's not something that's going to be added to the project because it's very niche or something totally outside of the project's domain.

But then there are the ones in between, and most of them fall into this category, where I'm not a fan but can't quite articulate and defend why that feature shouldn't be added.

How do you folks handle these kinds of requests? Do you just add them to a list of feature requests like we do or do you have some kind of guideline as to what type of feature requests you will accept? Also how do you close those feature requests without the user feeling shut down or ignored?

Thanks for your inputs, I'm really looking forward to the discussion and to finding out how you deal with these sorts of things.

Hi, I'm Patrick Ziegler

Patrick Ziegler — Tue, 02 May 2017 20:01:06 +0000

I have been coding since 2009 (wow that long already O.o).

I'm currently pursuing a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science at ETH in Zurich.

Due to my studies, I don't have quite as much time as I'd like to code for myself but when I do I'm most likely hacking around my Linux installation or my dev workflow.

It's really nice to be here and maybe I'll even write a post or two ;)

If you want, you can follow me on Twitter @patrick96MC

DEV Community: Patrick Ziegler

Open source Maintainers: How do you deal with feature requests?

Hi, I'm Patrick Ziegler