[qutebrowser] qutebrowser contributions / pull requests

Florian Bruhin me at the-compiler.org
Sun Oct 7 20:42:39 CEST 2018


Heya!

as you might know, I'm currently working on qutebrowser as a student
research project[1]. At the same time, there's a constant influx of pull
requests, as well as a backlog of pull requests (currently 25 open, 11
needing my review) I haven't gotten to because of the last exam session
around August.

On one hand, that's a great thing. There are almost 1200 closed pull
requests by ~240 contributors, and I'm glad that qutebrowser is a good
place for people to contribute to, be it routine contributors or someone
who just opened their first pull request ever.

On the other hand, a lot of that review work is done by me, and it's
more than you'd expect (probably around an hour of work per PR, in
average). That usually means I'm not the one deciding in what direction
qutebrowser's development goes, as I rarely find the time to work on
anything other than review and bugfixing (or keeping up with Qt updates)
myself nowadays - and when I do, it's usually during my holidays, like
with the PDF.js support.

While I have some more time for qutebrowser on my hands with the
research project, I also can't use the majority of that time for code
review, as there's a lot of other work to do (which hopefully will mean
there's an usable plugin API at some point).

Therefore, I'm asking people to please hold back contributions a bit
more: [2], [3], [4].

I'll try to still look at the currently open PRs, but I can't promise
anything there either. I know that sucks for people with PRs open for
months now, but now I can see the other side of the coin as well... The
more I think about it, the more it starts to feel like a burden rather
than a hobby.

I'll still take a quick look at pull requests, and merge anything that's
trivial enough, but I want to avoid spending longer blocks of time on
them for the moment. If you're unsure if that applies to whatever you
plan to contribute, please talk to me *before* starting to spend time on
it. If you want to contribute, please also consider doing so by
reviewing/testing pull requests rather than contributing new code.

I'm not sure yet how to handle this in the long run (as I'm working on
my Bachelor's Thesis next semester, where things might look similar).
In a bit less than a year, my studies are finished, and this should
hopefully clear up again.

If you know me, you know I care deeply about contributors (and users!),
so taking this step isn't easy. I think it's necessary in order to focus
on more important qutebrowser stuff for a while, though.

Things are probably going to stay like that for a while. As usual, I
don't give any firm ETAs for work I do in my free time, but I might be
able to set aside bigger blocks of time for PRs again at the end of
December, and early/mid February.

Florian

[1] https://lists.schokokeks.org/pipermail/qutebrowser-announce/2018-October/000052.html
[2] https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/blob/master/.github/CONTRIBUTING.asciidoc
[3] https://github.com/MunGell/awesome-for-beginners/pull/258
[4] https://github.com/up-for-grabs/up-for-grabs.net/pull/1030

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