Got a comment last week on one of the open-source projects I’m contributing to. We have an issue open, documenting that we’d like to support a certain feature, and this person clearly took quite a bit of time to pull together information, which gets us over the first major hurdle for this feature.
But also, this feature is really not the highest priority to us right now. Really had to stop myself from promising that we’d look into it in my response, because it is still quite a bit of work to actually make it a reality. I’m still new to all this, so I still have to learn to not feel bad about it. If they want to scratch their own itch, they’ll have to scratch it in full. That I’d review their code before merging, is honestly already quite a bit of effort put in by me for something that I don’t care to solve right now. That I take time to respond is basic decency, but still also uses up time. Really, I had not understood before, how much work it has to be for maintainers with an actually active community.
Well, I happen to be lucky enough that this particular project is actually developed as part of my dayjob. And the other projects, if I’m honest, are just projects I developed to scratch my own itch and then uploaded onto Codeberg with a libre license. I haven’t really announced them anywhere, except to a few colleagues, so I basically never get suggestions there.
But yeah, this project being part of my dayjob kind of makes it even more clear-cut that I’m not going to put in extra time to develop features that no one currently sponsors…