Hacker News Reader

Around a year ago I jumped in, picked up some tasks, submitted one or two PRs to fix where exceptions were being used for flow control, basic stuff to give the maintainers confidence that I could contribute. All they did was say those exceptions -- which happen every time the app starts -- don't need to be fixed.

A bit of a turn off for wanting to help on the project....

View on HN

I don't know the full context of the situation, but when you have a limited amount of time to tend to PRs, it doesn't make sense to review non functional changes. It also depends on what their testing situation is like. Are they relying on their canary users to report issues, or do they have integration tests?

There's also stuff like Hacktoberfest which used to encourage pointless PRs, and MOOCs or real courses which involve submitting PRs that often have no actual value to the project, which makes maintainers wary.

If anything it would make more sense to do it the other way around - make something useful, then once you are "in" they can wave through your non functional changes without much thought.

If a project is going to reject a “pointless improvement” then it is gonna be tough for any new contributors to get traction in the code base.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com