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Comment by boffinism | Hacker News Reader

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boffinism·

Honestly, the process didn't sound _that_ onerous to me...

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It’s not, just a bit long when you go through your first contribution. It’s probably 10mn of activity in total.

Though obviously it can feel outsized when trying to fix a typo.

Just waiting for the email can take 20 minutes due to greylisting.

But the thing's you don't have to wait for anything, you can start the process, it tells you to wait for an email, you do something else, when you see the email you resume the process.

Nothing in there is urgent in any way, or blocking, or prevents you from doing other things.

Yes, I agree there's a bit of hyperbole on those tweets (otherwise we wouldn't be discussing it here).

For example:

> But this contributor UX is holding Python back

As in, fixing one character typos?

If he didn't really want to follow the process to contribute, a bug report would have been fine (which is what finally happened, reading the PR).

He ended the PR with "I unfortunately feel that I've already exhausted the amount of energy I can dedicate to this", but he had some energy left to write that twitter thread.

FWIW, I had something similar happen when I contributed to React. A long CLA, a three-line PR (that was marked as a `easy first issue`), and eventually, after month and dozens of comments, a rebased PR that subsumed the issue. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, but it can turn off getting new contributors to your project who may, one day, become your core maintainers.

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