[etimberg]

I think it's reasonable to ask someone for a PR but it's also reasonable for that person to ask the maintainers how to do it. As a maintainer of a fairly popular library, I would love if everyone who "+1'd" a feature request asked on our slack channel how to implement it, or even emailed me. I've started closing feature requests that we aren't going to implement (don't belong in the core library) with something like "Closing because we will not implement this in the core. If you'd like to implement this as a plugin, post here and I can direct you in the right direction."

[p4wnc6]

I actually experience a lot of push back. Many project maintainers don't want more contributors, and feel like there are already too many cooks in the kitchen and they don't have time to help you figure out how to contribute or explain aspects of the existing code.

In general, the +1 sort of issues that I've seen mostly arise because (a) it's an implementation challenge that is not at all suited to a new contributor and needs significant attention from devs who are already very familiar; (b) it's a dev task that the existing devs don't want to do, for various reasons; and (c) it's a dev task that a huge and vocal contingent of users feels is really critical and that it's almost a dealbreaker in terms of their usage of the open source tool in the first place.

I feel like a lot of the replies on this thread that focus on pushing it back to the person who asked or the people who +1 are missing the point. The far more common scenario is when it's entirely implausible that any of those people could do it without intense and significant handholding from devs already familiar enough to do it more quickly themselves.

[adzicg]

for claudia I have a policy of replying to issues with ideas on how to implement it, and closing the issue one week after if there was no activity. got a fair few happy contributors now, and more people know the code base so they respond to users on the chat channel even when I'm not around.