Vviewpoints

DOI: 10.1145/1953122.1953137

Article development led by queue.acm.org

Kode vicious
think Before you fork

Dear KV,

Until recently I was working on a small open source project that had only three or four maintainers. I sent in a large and extensive patch, and got little or no comment. When I asked for commit access to the project repository I was refused, and was asked to go back and split up my patches into smaller sections for review. All of this back and forth happened over two months! Since the point of open source development and source-control systems is to commit and update early and often, you can imagine that I’m frustrated by this foot dragging on the part of the project’s official maintainers. I have considered just forking the project, but I’m not sure if I want to go it alone. I really just want my patches integrated and my new features to be available to the community.

frustrated and forking

Dear forking,

Most people who work on open source projects—especially the smaller ones that are not supported by some corporate entity—are, as you probably know, volunteers. Volunteers don’t have a great deal of time on their hands, unless they’re very wealthy volunteers. Have you met a lot of wealthy volunteers? I thought not.

Submitting a large patch to an open
source project with only a small num-
ber of possible reviewers is actually
pretty rude. You are asking people who
don’t know you to trust you with their
hard-won code base. Breaking down a
large patch into small patches is just
common courtesy to the maintainers,
so they can understand your code in
their few free moments and then inte-
grate it without upsetting the quality
of the larger code base. Having a patch
rebuffed and then asking for commit
access to their repo would be seen by
most project maintainers as annoy-
ing, if not insulting, and a wise project
maintainer would stay well away from
a prospective committer who acted in
this way.