It didn’t cross my mind to link the begging for contributions to being able to assess that I can help.
I am not sure to what extent others feel the same, but when it comes to evaluating what one can do, I am pretty confident when doing that evaluation for the projects I am working on as opposed to contributing to Julia-repo.
I know that there is always the make a PR, and let us tell you if it is garbage solution - but that feels more like fighting my way in approach. The same “…we’re volunteers too” applies here - and both the following were valid for a while now:
- I really love Julia and I want it to thrive
- I have (can make) time to contribute
In fact, I wanted to contribute in some way and after this topic cooled down I started to be more active here, on discourse.
I know that general true statements about what contributing to open-source projects means can be invoked and applied to Julia (and it is not like I am ignorant about those rules): however, I think we can at least entertain the idea that in a less technical way than, now mitigated, TTFX, Julia might have a time-to-first-PR issue (and is less relevant that other open-source projects might have this issue as well).
It was a clear TTFPR issue when I reported the following bug after I actually delved into Julia’s source code, detected the exact issue, and proposed the fix.
So why didn’t I PR the thing and only open an issue? Good question: I cannot pinpoint a single reason.
Maybe it was about a mix of various factors. But my honest answer is that I wanted to contribute, I had the time (and actually I had the local fix because the bug was really annoying) and still no PR.
If my case is singular and this I want + I can + I don’t mix is not a real issue that goes past my sole experience, then I think we can just let this go: I learned my lesson.
However, if there are things that can be done in the Julia community to reduce yet another TTF- something, then let’s use this opportunity and maybe lower the perceived bar for Julia-repo contributions.