Contributing to open source can be hard and frustrating

Has anyone ever told you that you should try contributing to some open source projects? Maybe they said it as advice for improving your resume or maybe they offered it as a solution to boredom. Either way, contributing to open source isn’t always as easy as it sounds.

Disclaimer: I’m in no way bitching or complaining about the following projects/people. These are just some past experiences I wanted to share.

Here’s a list of a few open source projects I’ve written (useful) patches for which haven’t been merged into the original project.

First up: Hpricot
As documented by this post, over a year ago I patched the Hpricot C and Java extensions to support arbitrarily large HTML elements. Instead of throwing an error after a certain buffer size had been hit, it would increase the memory allocation size. I did so because I was writing software for someone which did some website crawling and could potentially (and actually did) run into very large elements on the web (which crashed hpricot or threw an error). So it had a real world use case, judging by the responses I’ve gotten since I wrote it quite a few other people have had uses for it, and it just made sense. (Oh, it also didn’t affect performance)

But to this day, over a year later, I haven’t been able to get _why to merge it into hpricot core. I created a patch, made sure all the tests passed, sent an email to the mailing list, got a ticket filed on their trac. I’ve even rewritten the patch once to make it work with his latest code on github. I even forked his repo, did a pull request, and messaged him. He even responded saying he’d get to it soon. Over a month later, still nothing. Now I understand the reality is that he’s just really busy, but my reality is that it really sucks. Also, PLEASE, don’t take this as bitching, I’m just telling a story, I have total love for _why.
Update: _why just merged my patch, yes!! :P

Number two:
I was using the seattle.rb project ImageScience to thumbnail images for one of my client’s apps. It crashed on BMPs, and since BMPs were one of my client’s requirements, I made a (tiny) patch to their C extension to get it working. Again, all the tests passed, I created a ticket, harassed some people on IRC, etc. Over a year later, nothing. I think someone even closed the bug without giving reason. Again, judging from the number of downloads of the patched gem, people found real use in it (I’m trying to save myself from everyone thinking I write a bunch of useless patches).

Next up, Rails:
This was when Rails was just beginning their mission of “let’s be thread safe”. I really enjoy playing in the spaghetti of threaded programming so I decided to see if I could help and find some issues to patch. I found a race condition in their processing of partials and wrote a patch to fix it, along with a brute force test to produce the race condition. I posted it to the mailing list and a discussion ensued. The gist of it was that “we don’t like mutexes”, and my patch was never accepted, and never got any +1s. Well guess what they ended up doing eventually before rails was considered thread-safe… they added a mutex -_-. Needless to say, this turned me off to contributing to Rails. (In the latest version they actually did make some changes which render the mutex unnecessary but that is irrelevant for this story). Again please note, I’m not trying to bitch, I have nothing but love for the Rails guys, this is just my story.

Finally:
For one of my contracts I reworked the FireWatir (automated UI testing) code to be thread-safe so that you could control multiple browsers at the same time in different threads. Something which is extremely helpful when you are trying to simulate multiple users simultaneously. Loads of people have used my patch to aid in their FireWatir testing. It passed the entire test suite. But even after multiple emails to the maintainer of the project’s repository (who actually used my patch in his projects) for some reason it never got merged.

So what’s the conclusion from all these stories? Even after doing all the “right things” like making sure all the tests pass, ensuring performance isn’t affected, contacting the appropriate people through the appropriate channels I’ve had many patches go unloved. It’s kind of disheartening but I think what I’m learning is that you just have to be relentlessly persistent. Most people are just really busy and require a lot of external motivation if you want them to do things (which in the grand scheme of things are quite unimportant) for you. Of course at the same time you don’t wanna bug the shit out of someone by emailing them all the time, so…

I wonder if anyone has similar experiences or any advice on this sort of thing…