[cheald]

"Pull request welcome" usually means "This is a legitimate bug, but I don't care enough to fix this for you."

Some people believe that maintainers should fix all bugs that are reported to them. Other people believe that the open-source nature of the software should cause people to fix their own bugs and contribute the fixes back to the project, and both camps often believe that demands on their own time and effort are unreasonable.

[mpdehaan2]

Fortunately it doesn't for us.

In our case, one of the things I want to do is run it as a fully legitimate open source project.

In this case, we're going to be open and say when we can't work on something, or when we're unlikely to work on something, because we've got those 800+ contributors at or door asking for things.

There's a lot of triage.

In the past I've seen other projects take a few alternate routes - leave everyone hanging (unfair) or auto-merge everything (unstable). So that's kind of where we're at.

We do recognize we don't have /limitless/ resources, but this is kind of what you get for having a project on GitHub with so many stars and forks.

The user and testing community is absolutely awesome, but I when we say we aren't going to do something, it's because we want to be clear where we stand or have a conversation, or encourage people to contribute.

As Spock said "the needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few or the one". Triage!

[staz]

This is not a problem of entitlement where people expect that you fix their bug for them. This is an anti pattern because many people consider this type of answer rude and it doesn't create a welcoming community.

Saying "This is a legitimate bug, but I don't care enough to fix this for you." is already an order of magnitude more polite than "Pull request welcome" or the older "Patch welcome" , explaining in details why and if necessary how open source work even more so. You have to remember than not every one know the Open Source community speak. If you can guide the reporter on how to create said pull request, even better.

Yes its take more works and it's less fun than hacking at code, but building a great community is a lot of works. It's also, for me at least, what separate good projects from great ones

[mpdehaan2]

Yeah, but it's not the same thing.

This is a legit bug results in the bug staying open.

Pull requests welcome is "I feel this is a feature, but we'd be open to you working on it".

I think one of the great tragedies of the internet is people assuming people say things they don't mean.

And yes, building a great community is a lot of work, and it's something we spend a TON of time on. And it's why we have one of the most contributed to projects on Github.

Getting to 810 contributors is really hard, and you don't do it easily :)

[fred_durst]

EDIT: It looks like you did a quick edit to clarify your response. I think I understand that now. Thanks.