Long time no see my friends! 👋
Today I got notified by GitHub stale bot that a PR of mine in the famous PyTorch repo got closed by stale bot. 🤖
Y...
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Been there! OSS can feel brutal sometimes.
Not sure that this would have helped here, but one thing I've found helps make contributions to certain projects "stick" a bit more is first creating an issue.
From there, you have 2 options:
You can wait for feedback from the maintainers about whether the contribution would be accepted (saving yourself the frustration if they wouldn't accept the fix either way)
If you plan on opening the PR either way, you can then open the PR, and include a line that says "Closes #".
I've found that, for whatever reason, my PRs tend to land more when I do #2. It also lets us discuss the viability of the change, separate from the implementation, which I think some maintainers appreciate.
Bot limitation: It was asking for no-stale label, it seems it couldn't process your reply.
I'd like to do open source too, but most of the resources it require is a privilege not all of us have. I appreciate your initiative to save time for everyone, especially, new comers' time, like us.
Only maintainers can set the nostale label. This tenders the bot obsolete imo
Only maintainers can set the nostale label. This renders the bot obsolete imo
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When doing anything non-trivial, it's always better to discuss it with the project first to make sure it has a chance of being accepted. You might also get feedback to make your contribution better or more aligned with the existing project.
Not shameless at all! I know how hard it is to get maintainers joining in.
After a month? 😂 Your expectations are too high. Some of my PR’s are open since 2019 without any feedback:
Hey Vadim! Yeah I know many repos with a bunch of PRs dating back to years and this is such a wasted effort 😔 Often the PRs getting outdated and then circle as zombies around the repo until the repo gets abandoned altogether. Maybe my PR would have received the same fate if not stalebot was there to "make it quick" 🫠
Your expression of the experience is very relatable. In situations like this I've had to take the perspective of the maintenance of that information over time.
While it is useful and accurate now, it is part of the greater ecosystem enabling all of these various uses of the Nvidia package, and subject to external changes in terminology and naming convention.
I've taken to writing a readme in my own github detailing the specifics primarily for my own future reference, but also for anyone else looking to accomplish the same thing. Then I'm taking responsibility for that maintenance of information and keeping the package documentation constrained to its own specifics.
And, yes, I put my detailed analysis of the process to change the main drive belt on a Bobcat MT55 Mini-skidsteer loader in my github the other day because the service manual, and available videos on YouTube are less than optimal. 🫣
As a maintainer myself I can totally relate on the potentially endless efforts to keep information up to date. However, I see three things here as critical:
If we want more people to effectively contribute to open source then positive communication is a must.
I would have happily closed my PRs if I would have received a response like yours.
Just imagine how many first time contributors have had this experience...
Finally, I agree with your approach of "it's my duty now to step up and maintain that information myself" as a mature and grown up way to deal with this.
For me the emotional side of this has traditionally been the most difficult, because expressions and words represent threat or safety based on our own experiences. I've learned over time to carefully manage how I interpret communication, both from the perspective of the current reality of the other individual, and my own past experiences.
As for barrier of entry? Talk to Galileo about that. 🫣😏
Thank you for the informative post! I personally refrain from OSS for reasons like this, but I admire your approach to go directly to the source. It's something I will keep in mind the next time I find myself in a similar situation.
Yo Jan! I’m totally with you on this, getting your PR shot down by a BOT?! with zero review is straight-up frustrating!
In my mind, open source is supposed to make it easy for folks to jump in, not slap you with a "automatic" rejection that stings and wastes your time. Like, come on, if they want help, they gotta have a proper setup to actually look at PRs, not just let a bot play gatekeeper. Otherwise, just keep it private, you know?
Anyway, keep your head up! Bet you’re already past this, but let’s keep pushing to make contributing smoother and sweeter for everyone. You got this, keep killing it!
To someone that actually works on maintaining open-source code, this reads like an out-of-touch rant.
1st, your change is, all things considered, incredibly minor. The fact that it slipped through the cracks is far from a surprise. I agree that it has value (documentation is essential), but you need to look at that value in the grand scheme of things.
2nd, I don't think you realize how much mental load working on OSS represents. People are not idling around waiting for something to happen, and then neglecting PRs out of pure lazyness. Maintaining an OSS repo is living constantly with a nightmarish backlog, having to keep in mind dozens of changes, trying to remember what important stuff we're missing, answering questions, making reviews, and then on top of all that trying to be nice to people that are often too entitled for their own good. Also often times (not sure how it's for PyTorch) maintainers are not fully paid for this work. It might be work that people do on work hours but on the side of something else, or even outside of work hours. Maybe during the weekend, or the evening when the kids are asleep.
Having your work on OSS ignored is very common, there's wasted efforts for sure but we still have to make it work at the end of the day. I'm not sure a rant such as yours (even though it's quite mild, true) really helps anything or anyone. If you really want to give a helping hand, try making reviews, or looking into issues to find out the origin of a bug or something like that. This is helpful and will be appreciated for sure.
Yeah I've also tried contributing, but they don't even give time to check the PRs. I hate it 😠