Is meson open for new maintainers?

[Volker Weißmann]

Hello,

I'm a developer with way too much free time and idealism who thinks the
meson project is a good idea (mostly because I hate reading autoconf
files). Since you say about yourself [1]:

> A large fraction of Meson is contributed by people outside the core
team. This documentation explains some of the design rationales of Meson
as well as how to create and submit your patches for inclusion to Meson.
> Thank you for your interest in participating to the development.

and the issue tracker has a big pile of open issues, I assumed that the
meson project is in searches for more manpower.  So I decided to
contribute to the meson project. My intention was to start by writing
bugfixes, because these are the PRs where no one can object, and then
work my way up to implemented features, then to getting write
permissions then to becoming a core meson developer. (At least
potentially, of course I don't know for certain what the future holds
for me.) Perhaps I have the wrong impression but I always thought that
this is how open source projects operate.

So I went through the issue tracker, and wrote pull requests. Every time
a member of the meson team complained about something in my PR, I fixed
it. Some of my PRs got merged, but others did not, most notable these ones:

https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/pull/11585
https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/pull/11654
https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/pull/11677
https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/pull/11760

These PRs are all small patches that fix a bug that someone opened an
issue about. I fixed everything the team complained about, the CI is
green, but they are neither getting merged nor anyone is saying what the
problem is, or what else I should fix about them. Since quite a while (7
weeks in the case of #11585) now these PRs are in the state of "me
waiting for a response from the team", but there is radio silence which
leaves me with the questions:

- Why is there radio silence?
- Will there ever be a response from the team?
- Has the team currently no time to look at PRs from new devs? Perhaps
because someone is on holiday or something?
- Will they ever have time?
- Is there something wrong with my PRs?
- Is "going through the issue tracker and fixing bugs" the wrong
approach? Should I contribute differently to meson?
- Do I have the wrong idea how open source projects operate?

If the PRs are getting merged after a long wait that is fine for me,
since these bugs are nothing I need urgently fixed for myself, but if
they *never* get merged I waste my time creating them which would be bad.

I assumed that the PRs are never going to get merged, so I stopped
creating new PRs, but I will start contributing again if I get an
appropriate response here and I understand the situation.

I don't have a problem with you criticizing my code, or telling me that
I should be doing it differently, or telling me that I'm not
wanted/needed, but I do have a problem with uncertainty. I understand
that I cannot *demand* anything from you, but a bit more ...
communication ... would be nice and necessary for me to contribute.


Greetings

Volker Weißmann


[1] https://mesonbuild.com/Contributing.html

[Jussi Pakkanen]

On Sat, 13 May 2023 at 00:37, Volker Weißmann
<volker.we...@gmail.com> wrote:

> These PRs are all small patches that fix a bug that someone opened an
> issue about. I fixed everything the team complained about, the CI is
> green, but they are neither getting merged nor anyone is saying what the
> problem is, or what else I should fix about them. Since quite a while (7
> weeks in the case of #11585) now these PRs are in the state of "me
> waiting for a response from the team", but there is radio silence which
> leaves me with the questions:
>
> - Why is there radio silence?
> - Will there ever be a response from the team?
> - Has the team currently no time to look at PRs from new devs? Perhaps
> because someone is on holiday or something?
> - Will they ever have time?
> - Is there something wrong with my PRs?
> - Is "going through the issue tracker and fixing bugs" the wrong
> approach? Should I contribute differently to meson?
> - Do I have the wrong idea how open source projects operate?

Thank you for submitting these fixes .This indeed how development
should work, but the unfortunate fact is that we are quite heavily
understaffed. No-one is paid to work on Meson full time, and in fact
almost all work is done by volunteers in their spare time. It does not
really help that Meson gets _a lot_ of bug and PR email. In fact
merely reading all of it would probably be a full time job, let alone
answering them.

So yes, you were doing things absolutely correctly, it's just that we
don't have a lot of resources. If there is one thing I would recommend
is that you don't open too many pull requests at once, but instead
feed them in one or maybe two at a time.

[Eli Schwartz]

On 5/12/23 5:37 PM, Volker Weißmann wrote:

> So I went through the issue tracker, and wrote pull requests. Every time
> a member of the meson team complained about something in my PR, I fixed
> it. Some of my PRs got merged, but others did not, most notable these ones:
>
> https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/pull/11585
> https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/pull/11654
> https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/pull/11677
> https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/pull/11760
>
> These PRs are all small patches that fix a bug that someone opened an
> issue about. I fixed everything the team complained about, the CI is
> green, but they are neither getting merged nor anyone is saying what the
> problem is, or what else I should fix about them. Since quite a while (7
> weeks in the case of #11585) now these PRs are in the state of "me
> waiting for a response from the team", but there is radio silence which
> leaves me with the questions:

My apologies specifically for #11585 -- I think the main problem there
is that I don't know much about fortran, and it is difficult for me to
test or know what it should be doing. I think I was kind of hoping
someone with more knowledge of the topic could handle it :) and
fortunately Jussi has done just that -- but I should have been clearer
that my style nit wasn't a full review, and looped someone else in.


--
Eli Schwartz