[pagekalisedown]

Another issue that wasn't covered is duplication of effort.

Imagine working on a feature for weeks, only to realize that other people with more experience and knowledge of the project are doing the same work.

What's the incentive from the maintainer's point of view to reduce duplication of effort? The maintainer's not paying either developers, and they have a backup if one of them doesn't come thru.

But from a developer's perspective, it's frustrating to put efforts into a patch that doesn't end up being used.

[DanBC]

> What's the incentive from the maintainer's point of view to reduce duplication of effort?

The maintainer has a lot of work that needs doing, thus s/he wants to avoid duplication to get that work done. Also, s/he will know how disappointing it is to write software that is not used, and s/he will want to keep programmers happy.

[buddydvd]

I've ran into situations where my pull requests duplicated effort made by older unmerged pull requests. I know I should've reviewed all the existing pull requests before coding, but repos with more pull requests make that workflow pretty tedious. When you view a file on Github, it shows you a list of contributors to that file. I'd like to see Github also add a feature to show a list of pending pull requests affecting that file. This helps contributors avoid duplication of work as well as providing users an easy way to identify potential bug fixes that are pending review.

[pagekalisedown]

That's a really great idea! It would be a solid step in the right direction.

[bct]

That's why you hang out on IRC (or the mailing list or wherever) and ask if anyone's working on it before you start.