I know first-hand the frustration of having PRs ignored and it can be quite demoralizing, so I do feel for the author. It sounds like the author is getting to a place of peace with it, and my advice from having been down that path before is to do exactly that, and find something else interesting to hack on.
Having said that, I would never contribute to a project with a first contributor experience like this one.
> perfect for first contributions, especially to get through the myriad of bots requesting you to sign/review stuff
At the same time as they
> can often end up taking more time away from contributing engineers doing reviews and testing than they are worth
> For each of my emails, I got a reply, saying that they "sincerely apologize" and "@Dalibor Topic Can you please review...", with no actual progress being made.
then
> Sorry to hear this. .... @Dalibor Topic <dalibor.topic at oracle.com>, can we get this prioritized?
This is pretty morbidly funny.
Many projects behave this way, particularly those with corporate overlords. At best, it will take weeks to get a simple patch reviewed. By then, I have moved on, at least with my intention to send anything upstream. I commend the author for giving them a whole year, but I have found that is best a recipe for disappointment.
Maintainers: how you react to patches and PRs significantly influence whether or not you get skilled contributors. When I was maintaining such projects, I always tried to reply within 24 hours to new contributors.
It would be interesting to see how quickly the retention rate drops off as the time to review/accept patches goes up. I imagine it looks like an exponential drop off.
dwroberts•1h ago
jstanley•1h ago
By my reading, it's not merely that the standard doesn't require the "d" suffix, it's that the standard doesn't allow the "d" suffix, and the code won't compile on anything but gcc.
freedomben•1h ago
1. Is "anything but gcc" actually supported by the project? Do they have a goal of supporting other compilers or possibly an explicit decision not to support other compilers?
2. If they do support other compilers, how did the "d" suffix make it in the first place? That's something I would expect the dev or CI to catch pretty quickly.
3. Does gcc behave any differently with the "d" suffix not there? (I would think a core dev would know that off the top of their head, so it's possible they looked at it and decided it wasn't worth it. One would hope they'd comment on the PR though if they did that). If it does, this could introduce a really hard-to-track-down bug.
I'm not defending Oracle here (in fact I hate Oracle and think they are a scourge on humanity) but trying to approach this with an objective look.
dundarious•19m ago
dwroberts•1h ago
My initial comment was maybe unfair but I can completely sympathise with the maintainers etc. that separately these PRs look like random small edits (e.g. from a linter) with no specific goal
imcritic•48m ago
thethirdone•1h ago
ablob•1h ago
perryprog•1h ago
Twirrim•43m ago