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A contribution to an open source project is a gift with a hundred strings attached.

In most cases it's a request for more of the maintainer's time to review, fix, and merge a change which they themselves likely don't need (otherwise they would have added it). In my experience, at least 80% of the time I end up spending more time and effort on accepting someone's change than I would have writing it myself. It only becomes net-positive when a contributor has a long-lived interest in the project and turns out to be a capable maintainer with similar sensibilities; even then there is significant ramp-up time. 99% of the time this doesn't happen; most contributions are drive-bys.

P.S. It so happens that that we previously interacted on that very PR thread: https://github.com/BurntSushi/toml/pull/65#issuecomment-1919...



> P.S. It so happens that that we previously interacted on that very PR thread:

Yup. I recognized your username and note that our interaction happened over a year after the original pull request discussion with no response from the repo owner.

> In my experience, at least 80% of the time I end up spending more time and effort on accepting someone's change than I would have writing it myself

Sure but the general culture and expectation in open source is when people find bugs or create features, as good citizens they share the changes upstream. If what you want to do is "throw the code over" or you've lost interest in developing further, all you need to do is to say that as common courtesy to your fellow open source developer especially if like in this case a lot of people use it. Lots of repos do this and clearly stated deprecation.




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