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by jeremysmyth 4249 days ago
In an ideal world, the open source community would be precisely the sort of mutually-supportive group that would lead to this. Unfortunately, it can't be, in general:

- Telling someone who makes a bad or unsuitable suggestion why it's bad requires a certain amount of communication skill and desire to communicate that programmers (particularly amateur programmers) are not widely known for

- It doesn't scale: If an already busy project leader is handling some pull requests that are valid (and doing her own work at the same time), then handling random pull requests that aren't suitable for whatever reason becomes unpleasant work.

I know many people reading this already have lots of free time and lots of good communication skills, but I think it's safe to say that you couldn't say that about many unpaid open-source project leaders.