projects@yorhel.nl
home - git - @ayo
= pgp = only used for releases
key - mit
7446 0D32 B808 10EB A9AF A2E9 6239 4C69 8C27 39FA

Cute decorative scissors, cutting through your code.

Want to contribute?

Every free/open source software project is run in a different way. To set the right expectations and prevent disappointment and/or wasted effort, here’s a few notes on how I deal with contributions.

Feedback of any kind is always welcome, but I make no promise that I will act on it. Feel free to open an issue on my git forge or mail me at projects@yorhel.nl.

I love bug reports, so don’t hesitate to report anything that doesn’t work or doesn’t work as you had expected. Whether I will actually fix it depends on the nature of the bug, of course, but I do very much value stable and reliable software.

Feature requests are welcome, but I tend to not act on most of them and may sometimes outright reject a feature if it seems out of scope. It’s still good to have a list of potential features to work on if I feel like making myself useful, so new ideas are nonetheless appreciated.

Feel free to send patches and pull requests for trivial fixes for simple bugs, documentation issues, typos, etc. If the change is trivial to review and improves the software in a noticeable way, I’m happy to apply it. Don’t bother submitting patches for things that don’t noticeably improve the software. I don’t give a damn about compiler warnings when they don’t affect the correctness of the code. Slight inconsistencies in code style or typos in variable names or comments (i.e. non-user visible parts) don’t really need fixing, either.

When it comes to patches or pull requests for larger fixes or new features, I strongly advise you to get in touch first to discuss your planned changes. After all, there’s a good chance I already have opinions about it. Generally speaking, I have no intention to merge code that I haven’t thoroughly reviewed, and I enjoy programming much more than I enjoy reviewing other people’s code, so just throwing patches over the fence and expecting me to merge anything is a recipe for disappointment.

If you use my software in combination with proprietary software or a proprietary OS (like MacOS or Windows), then you’re mostly on your own. I write free software because I care about user freedom, so I’m not inclined to spend time and effort improving my code to better work with software that I wouldn’t recommend anyone to use. I may accept the occasional fix if it’s simple enough, but I’ve no intention to bend over backwards.