> your users don't deserve hostility from you either!
No one has the right to demand my time to review their PR to my code and explain or justify a rejection. If I don't want to accept PRs, that's a valid choice on my part.
That has nothing to do with this discussion.
People have a right to propose changes to broken things they use. Your right to ignore them and not provide support is a two-way street. Others also have a right to ignore what you want and propose changes for other users to see.
it's right there is name of the feature "Pull Request", it's a request, not a demand.
If you were operating a non-profit business in person, you can't get mad at people suggesting changes either. You can ignore them for sure, you can pull up some disclaimer or whatever. But it's hostile and mean to prevent people from even stating their opinions and proposing a change.
At that point, make your project private.
You don't owe the public many things, but when you create a project and make it public on a shared hosting site, other users also have rights to make commentary, since you've exposed it as public, and proposals and to assist each other. I'd even go further to say that this counts as intentional interference with users' attempt to fix vulnerable and buggy code, and as such an intentional attempt to harm the public. It's one thing to not guarantee anything about your software, it's another thing to prevent people from trying to fix it.
Nothing is stopping them from doing that. But they are not entitled to do it on my repo.
What you guys are suggesting on this thread is to prohibit people who gained access to your repo as a result of you making it public (not just the zip/tarball of the code, but the repo) from linking the changes they made in their repo to the original parent repo. They're requesting you merge their changes, but not demanding, and you can ignore them. but that request and linkage helps your users, who are already not being supported by you or given any warrantly of usability of functionality by anyone at all. You're making something available to people and making it harder for them to support each other and fix the software on their own.
I know that opening a PR does not affect the first, but it very much affects the second. For my project both are mine, and just as I have the right to ignore a PR and I have the right to reject any after they’re opened, so too do I have the right to reject PRs before they’re opened.
> their version
And they can keep doing that without cluttering my page.
> what you guys are suggesting…
So what? Who or what states they are entitled to have their changes visible as a request on my repo?
Having publicly accessible issue and PR pages opens breeds the kind of entitlement you are showing here: they do not have a right to open requests on my page any more than people have a “right” to comment on a blog post or a YouTube video. And keeping an issue/PR section available leads people to assume that they have a right to do it simply because they can.
Here's the root of your misunderstanding. “Broken” is subjective, relative only to you.
> it's right there is name of the feature "Pull Request", it's a request, not a demand.
That's marketing-speak. It is absolutely a demand. PRs are a growth-hacking feature and are part of how GitHub got to be so dominant. The abuse of social pressure calling someone's project unmaintained was the same mechanism used for the XZ Utils backdoor: https://securelist.com/xz-backdoor-story-part-2-social-engin...
This is not a misunderstanding. I want to know what other people subjectively think is broken, and their proposed fixes. So, if I agree with them, I can opt to use their fixes. A lot of time the developer does not want to maintain the added complexity, or does not agree with architectural or design decisions by the contributor, and that's fine. But I, as a user might agree with the contributor. it costs you, as the maintainer nothing to let people propose changes. nothing at all. as others have repeated many times on this thread, you're not even obliged to respond to PRs, it won't even cost you appearance or reputation. You're just annoyed, that's it, and instead of ignoring the thing that annoys you, the solution is hostility.
> That's marketing-speak. It is absolutely a demand.
If you have a contributor policy clearly defined, it isn't. When you publish a project for the public, people will use it, that's the expectation.
Perhaps if github linked your contributor policy that might help. You can also setup an action that will auto-close all PRs, commenting your contributor policy for everyone to see the reason. There are many ways to handle this, but people on this thread are choosing the lazy option that harms users the most. I think part of it might be that many of you have not dealt with projects that benefit heavily from PRs.
And I do not. In fact I don't want to hear from anyone who uses my software at all, in any way. My software is for me, not for you, and not for them. If you think it's broken, make your own that isn't.
