[kelnos]

Fair point, but most of us on the team don't really have much time to spare to work on the project at all, let alone for mentorship, unfortunately. We'd rather be writing our own code, and taking contributions from people who don't require a lot of hand-holding. And it's not like this guy is an entry-level developer. He's clearly been doing it for a while, and is skilled. More like he needs to be taught how to interact with other developers on the internet in order to contribute without turning into a burden on others' time. Unfortunately I don't have the time (or patience, really) to teach that sort of thing.

[ikawe]

I’ve never interacted with this person in particular, but your description makes me feel seen. It so perfectly describes interactions I’ve had - where a clearly well meaning and in some ways capable developer makes tons of change requests, which are sort of neutral or maybe slightly positive even, but take up so much effort to incorporate relative to their value that it’s just not worth it, and in my estimation would be better off disappearing.

Often times, when I do work with them to get their changes merged, I’m tempted to make similar changes myself, rather than workshop pull requests for days and weeks. Not because I think the changes are even worthwhile to incorporate, but because it’s less painful than the back and forth to get their changes up to snuff - but “stealing their idea” is socially awkward for its own reasons.

There’s also sometimes a bias towards merging unless you find a problem, so it can feel really antagonistic. Strangers on the internet become your task masters to an extent.

The common reactions I see to not wanting these kind of contributions are “You’re looking a gift horse in the mouth!” Or “It would go more smoothly if you spent more time unwillingly being a Manager for strangers on the internet” or “You’re gate keeping.” To an extent I suppose all these things are true. But, that doesn’t mean it’s the wrong decision. It can be frustrating to experience and difficult to explain if you haven’t been in the position.

Anyway, it’s nice to hear someone else articulate my experience. It makes me feel less crazy. So I wanted to partially return the favor and say also that you may not be crazy.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> Fair point, but most of us on the team don't really have much time to spare to work on the project at all, let alone for mentorship, unfortunately.

It's legitimate, of course (if you don't have time you don't have time), but that would make me worry about the project's future.

[kelnos]

That's pretty much been the status quo for us for 20+ years now, and yet we're still chugging along, making regular major releases every 2 years, with bugfix releases periodically in between. I worked on it from 2004 to 2009, took a long break, and got involved again about a year and a half ago. The cast of characters (aside from the original project creator) have all changed, but there's still enough interest to keep things going.

And sure, maybe that will change someday, and interest will fade, and the project will end up unmaintained. That'd be a shame, but that's fine. Doesn't invalidate or make useless what we're doing now, and doesn't mean our users need to make any big plans to change their workflows.

[E39M5S62]

I don't often get the chance to talk to people that work on software I've used every day for years and years - so thank you for all of your work on XFCE. It's a fantastic project that 'just works'.

[mnau]

Most projects run on 1-2 devs. That is the situation for top 1000 projects in your ecosystem (npm, nuget, pypy). Roughly half will be this way.

Take random project and go to github insights/contributions tab to see for yourself.