I didn’t have a positive experience with my own contribution. While working with SSH keys in Go, I realized there was no existing method to calculate a key fingerprint. Seeing as this is a reasonably common operation, I opened a PR and added it.
I was told—with a straight face—that it was unnecessary because it’s simple enough to read the RFC and do it yourself.
It was eventually added, but that experience taught me a lot about the mentality of the maintainers behind the project.
It was an initial reply to another user, which was immediately reconsidered and accepted when the request was clarified to include colons. There was concern about the breadth of a single package, and if this should be included in a sibling package. This was all in one morning.
The original user closed the ticket, and was reopened after your comment.
> On the other hand, if I have to read a five-page document, sign up for a third-party code review tool, install strange and mysterious new git commands, and send a diff to a mailing list, only to invariably need to argue endlessly to get a ~15-line function added to a x/ package, hopefully you'll understand why I don't.
Indeed, this was recognized a large obstacle for contributors, and the process changed. The community now accepts contributions via GitHub. Unfortunately, this change happened after your contribution, but is now available should you decide to contribute in the future.
The Dart standard library didn't implement an RFC correctly, so I submitted a fix with a PR and was given the run around about how nothing was actually wrong, despite citing the RFC and giving test cases to reproduce errors. It wasn't until another Google employee showed up much later and echoed that there was a problem with Dart's implementation that the maintainers would acknowledge the problem even existed.
The kicker is that the maintainers at Google then followed up with wanting me to submit another PR with additional changes that they wanted to see instead either merging the fix or adding the additional changes themselves.
Now my attitude towards Google's open source projects is if they want contributions, they can pay me. I'm not wasting my time for free again for them.
Sorry to hear that. For what it’s worth: I once submitted a tiny pull request for Bazel (IIRC allowing insecure connections to localhost for docker repositories) and it was accepted and merged within a few days. Positive experience overall.
I was told—with a straight face—that it was unnecessary because it’s simple enough to read the RFC and do it yourself.
It was eventually added, but that experience taught me a lot about the mentality of the maintainers behind the project.