[lelanthran]

> TBH I never contributed to Open Source because of the effort needed to bring my PR from "works on my machine" to "compliant with the rest of codebase". Especially that I only want to implement one small thing.

That's a good thing; OSS projects don't want drive-by contributors, they want a community. A small bit of friction is a good thing.

After all, we can see what happens with frictionless contributions.

[tough]

I some times will open a PR even if i know it will get closed, simply by because if its a bugfix or feature i want, someone else might do so too, and i have many times adopted code from PR's that were never adopted by mainstream or closed.

By pushing that PR, i might be annoying a grouchy maintainer, but at the same time helping tens or hundreds of other users of the software.

Imho the beauty of open source is as long as you're adhering to the licenses, you can do whatever the heck you want =)

[ahartmetz]

If you already know it's not good enough, you can just say so by calling it a proof of concept or hack to demonstrate what needs to be done. Such code is often very useful when writing the real fix.

[greiskul]

Yup, some of my first contributions when I was a teenager, was to an open source project where I was able to find a couple of bugs, and implement a hacky solution that I shared with the team on the forum. My code was absolutely awful, but by having done both the effort of tracking down the cause of the bug, and one possible way of fixing it (which was badly coded, but worked), made the developers able to quickly turn around and edit my patches into actual patches that got merged into the project.

And it was actually a pretty good feeling. Made me feel that even as a newbie programmer, I was adding value to the community, which I was!

[ahartmetz]

I've done the same for a fix in the Gold linker, which is now obsolete due to even faster linkers being available. Shout out to Ian Lance Taylor, his behavior as the maintainer was exemplary: very gracious and very responsive.