[alastairp]

When I first started contributing to open source projects on sourceforge using cvs or svn, it was normal to send patches to the mailing list and for the maintainer to say something like "thanks, I've applied it with a few small changes". I feel that the workflow that GitHub pull requests encourages is that a maintainer will often make detailed comments and it's up to the contributor to fix every last detail, which can often be difficult if they're a new contributor.

In some of my projects, when a new contributor submits a first patch, I've started to do something similar to what people did for me in the past. I will work with them to make major improvements if needed, but if there are a few small things (fix some styling, improve a test, etc), I will just make those changes myself in order to get the PR merged. I understand that this isn't always possible on all projects, and depending on people's spare time, but I think that it's a nice way of showing people that their contributions are welcome without getting bogged down in rules about whitespace or naming.