I was in a discussion thread with folks from Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Kubernetes today, and this phrase came up again. The context was something along the lines of… “we’re afraid that will encourage low-quality contributions.”
Let’s dig in to this. Also, since we’re overusing this phrase today, let’s just abbreviate low-quality contributions as “LQC” for the rest of this article.
The reason LQC are such a plague is because most people are used to committing code, but new open source contributors aren’t used to reviewing code for a project with a large committer base.
For this article, I’m going to look at ways you can limit the number of LQC you receive and even more ways to stop making them yourself.
But before we make the list, we need to understand some of the most common culprits that earn the badge of “LQC.”
What an LQC isn’t…
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A PR from an unknown person.
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A long-lived, draft PR.
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A PR that needs improvements.
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A PR that needs a lot of improvements.
Sure, those things are tedious, but they don’t make a PR low-quality in the sense that we’re talking about here.
What an LQC is…
I’m sure this isn’t an exhaustive list, but here are the first four culprits that come to mind:
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Work that is contributed with no context for the reviewer(s), or no confirmation the work is needed at this time.
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Work beyond the scope or vision of the project.
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A pull request with poor hygiene.
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Code or documentation that doesn’t follow established best practices.
How Maintainers Can Reduce LQCs
You don’t need to be reminded, but I’ll mention it again: contributors are almost universally just trying to help. Remember to assume positive intent, and it’ll do wonders for your mental health (and (Read more...)
