On Sat, Aug 23, 2025 at 10:29:37AM -0700, Otto Kekäläinen wrote: > On Sat, 23 Aug 2025 at 08:00, Andrea Bolognani <eof@kiyuko.org> wrote: > > On Fri, Aug 22, 2025 at 01:34:16PM -0700, Otto Kekäläinen wrote: > > > So all the effort the submitter did - and also me as mentor - was in > > > vain. This is not the end of the world, but I wanted to share it as an > > > anecdote of the new contributor experience. > > > > I find it quite interesting that you would qualify this as a wasted > > effort on the mentee's part and your own. > > > > This implies that the primary goal when opening the MR was getting > > the person's name into the Debian changelog / git log, not improving > > Debian or gaining experience in how to contribute. So it sounds to me > > like your perception of the outcome was heavily influenced by the > > initial framing. > > No, it does not imply. Actually I find it quite demotivating having > spent extensive amounts of time improving Debian in various ways that > somebody writes on debian-devel@ that my goal is *not improving > Debian*. Please don't write such things. Instead assume good faith and > think about what the positive interpretation would be in case I didn't > write clearly enough. You're right, my reply was based on an uncharitable reading of your message, which was completely unwarranted. I failed to assume good intent on your part, and for that I sincerely apologise. Thank you for calling me out. Be assured that I will do better in the future. I genuinely hope that your motivation for contributing to Debian was not permanently affected by this unfortunate interaction. > Try to think about it from the contributor's point of view: if you > spend time debugging something and produce and submit a fix, and it > gets accepted, you as the submitter can be sure that you really helped > improve Debian, and all the effort you did in testing and documenting > your fix was read by somebody, approved and incorporated into the > software. > > However, if do all this work and discover that the first reply on your > MR was it being closed, there is no validation that you helped improve > Debian. The maintainer might have seen and copied your code, or the > maintainer might have investigated and fixed it on their own, in which > case all your efforts were in vain. But you don't know. While the > visibility part of getting credits is nice, it is certainly not the > goal, just a part of it. The main benefit from getting your > contribution in is validation that you indeed did something that was > sufficiently good to get accepted and valuable to Debian, and it will > strengthen your confidence to repeat the same next time you run into a > bug. I would argue that the maintainer applying the exact same fix as the one you came up with is implicit validation of your work. But regardless of whether they took your code and applied it (in which case attribution should certainly be provided), came up with an identical fix independently, or decided to go with a different one for whatever reason, I think it's not unreasonable to expect at least a brief reply explaining why the MR wasn't accepted. -- Andrea Bolognani <eof@kiyuko.org> Resistance is futile, you will be garbage collected.
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