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by btown 3200 days ago
Code style, inconsistent APIs, a feature that's barely tested by its own contributor, introducing dependencies on innards that were planned to be removed by an ongoing refactoring project, etc. So many ways contributions can go wrong.
2 comments

All those things should and hopefully would have been caught when the PR was made, not after the commits made it into master.
The entire context of this thread is that adding committers can introduce risk in the quality of accepted contributions. Building a trusted network of gatekeepers is hard.
Just because stuff gets to master doesn't mean they get to the release.
> Code style

How is that an issue in this day and age? Just run astyle or indent.

> Just run astyle or indent.

"Style" is more than indentation - my favourite example is something I worked with very closely, but always needed a cheat-sheet on my desk - the PHP arrays api.

Just look at the docs for array_search and array_replace.

This is much worse in managed memory languages - do you allocate memory, who frees it, who can use a buffer in zero-copy mode, who can't ... whether the functions are always re-entrant.

All that said - any originating coder who burns out due to support issues, killing the community is measurably worse off than someone who has thousands of users who demand that you support such "legacy" APIs for another six months.