Re: When should one send a PR and when not?

[Jonathan Perkin <jperkin%joyent.com@localhost>]

* On 2020-10-06 at 14:36 BST, Greg Troxel wrote:

> And I would encourage Ottavio and others to try to fix failing packages.
> pkgsrc survives over the long term by turning users into developers.

Yeh I also forgot to emphasise this, and it's a very important point.

I would _much_ prefer to spend my time helping to train people up to
become developers, whether that's directly, or by writing blogs and
howtos and infrastructure, than spend that time closing PRs.  "Teach a
man to fish" is a little worn at this point, but is still very true.

If there's anything in particular that you feel is stopping you from
getting to the point where you would be able to submit a patch for the
issue that is blocking you, then asking for help is vastly preferable,
and everyone wins.  You get to learn something, we get to improve our
documentation, the developer pool grows, and pkgsrc gets more fixes.

I've tried to do this within the illumos community by making it as
easy as possible for people to develop packages and patches, and so
far that work has brought in at least 3 new developers and a bunch of
user contributions via GitHub pull requests, so it definitely works.

-- 
Jonathan Perkin  -  Joyent, Inc.  -  www.joyent.com