[p4wnc6]

That's very unrealistic. I may be a casual user of a tool, while the fix requires deep familiarity with internal parts. The age-old answer of "fix it yourself" is silly, unless project maintainers don't care if what they make actually helps people.

In your comment there again is this mention that the dev time is volunteered, but this is a red herring. The time isn't useful just because it's volunteered. It has to be both volunteered and directed at effort that addresses something people need. If it's volunteered, but not directed at something people need, I think it's perfectly reasonable that they use some mechanism to indicate they feel dev resources aren't being allocated in a satisfactory way.

[etimberg]

I think it's reasonable to ask someone for a PR but it's also reasonable for that person to ask the maintainers how to do it. As a maintainer of a fairly popular library, I would love if everyone who "+1'd" a feature request asked on our slack channel how to implement it, or even emailed me. I've started closing feature requests that we aren't going to implement (don't belong in the core library) with something like "Closing because we will not implement this in the core. If you'd like to implement this as a plugin, post here and I can direct you in the right direction."

[p4wnc6]

I actually experience a lot of push back. Many project maintainers don't want more contributors, and feel like there are already too many cooks in the kitchen and they don't have time to help you figure out how to contribute or explain aspects of the existing code.

In general, the +1 sort of issues that I've seen mostly arise because (a) it's an implementation challenge that is not at all suited to a new contributor and needs significant attention from devs who are already very familiar; (b) it's a dev task that the existing devs don't want to do, for various reasons; and (c) it's a dev task that a huge and vocal contingent of users feels is really critical and that it's almost a dealbreaker in terms of their usage of the open source tool in the first place.

I feel like a lot of the replies on this thread that focus on pushing it back to the person who asked or the people who +1 are missing the point. The far more common scenario is when it's entirely implausible that any of those people could do it without intense and significant handholding from devs already familiar enough to do it more quickly themselves.

[adzicg]

for claudia I have a policy of replying to issues with ideas on how to implement it, and closing the issue one week after if there was no activity. got a fair few happy contributors now, and more people know the code base so they respond to users on the chat channel even when I'm not around.

[adzicg]

> The time isn't useful just because it's volunteered. It has to be both volunteered and directed at effort

useful depends on the target. something might be useful to you but not to other people. big part of successful product management is deciding on good market segments. as a casual user of a tool, you might not be in a segment that the project maintainers care a lot. annoying maintainers won't help at all if that is the case. learning about the code and fixing it will.

[p4wnc6]

By definition though, we're talking about issues that get a huge steam of +1's, and are unequivocally extremely useful to a wide group of the project's users.

When the project maintainers fail to prioritize the things that huge streams of users are +1-ing, I think that's a strong signal that the project maintainers just want to poke around their preferred aspects of the project, rather than address actual needs.

In that sense, they aren't actually "volunteering" time -- they are receiving the compensation of their satisfaction of poking around only the parts of the code they like. They aren't doing it "for" anyone but themselves, and it's this idea that all open source contributions are "volunteered" and are given infinity free passes from criticisms about prioritization that causes a lot of the trouble.

In order for the time to be "volunteered" it has to be directed at things that others are benefiting from. If few are benefiting and it's just a personal quirk, curiosity, or interest of some random developer -- who wants to tune out the +1 noise of people asking for things they actually need -- then that developer deserves zero praise or kudos for "volunteering" time or anything. There's no sense in which it's generous to fail to support aspects of a project that people need in order to instead support aspects of a project you personally happen to like.

I think a lot of the +1 streams are about this kind of tension. Developers saying, "leave me alone ... I'm already doing this 'for free' -- what more do you want." And then cranky users saying in reply, "But you're not doing anything 'for free' -- you're picking the parts that bring you personal satisfaction and then trying to argue that those are higher priority than the things project users rely on and need."

[nicky0]

And it is perfectly reasonable for devs to ignore the annoying steam of +1s and do what they want anyway.

[p4wnc6]

In some cases it may be reasonable, but generally it's not at all reasonable. As mentioned in another comment, there is no sense in which it's generous to forsake aspects of a project that people need or rely on in order to instead focus on aspects that you personally find interesting. That's no longer "volunteering" or "helping out" but in fact is actually just taking limited resources away from core project improvements, and is quite a selfish way to interact with a given open source community.

Of course, developers don't have to contribute to an open source project at all. And if they do, it doesn't have to be in a "volunteering" sense in which their work actively offers benefit to others. They are free to choose instead to more selfishly only prioritize contributing in ways they personally want or like. But if they do, then they no longer can turn around and act like others should be gracious for their "generous" contribution to the project.

I guess I would say that developers can ignore the useful stream of +1s in order to more selfishly work on aspects that bring them personal satisfaction, instead of deriving satisfaction from the benefit offered to wide ranges of users. It's not that it's reasonable or unreasonable. It's just literally a particular option they could choose.

If they choose that, in cases where no serious rationale is given to explain why there is some more beneficial project agenda in the short term, then such petty disregard for a massive pile of evidence about what your project users needs are is a pretty strong indication of a bad library/project, with alarming dysfunction.

So in this sense, the +1 stream is a really useful barometer of the project.

Either the core developers say, "whoops, my bad, I had been intending to volunteer time which necessarily implies that my efforts should be focused on whatever the users benefit from the most -- let me switch to work on this hugely +1'd issue I'd been ignoring" ... or they say, "I hear you everybody, but since I'm more familiar with the project internals, let me offer a technical rationale for why we need to delay addressing this in order to work on other stuff first" ... or they say, "Screw you all for bothering me. I'm 'volunteering' my time on this, so I'm going to do what I want. I don't like this big +1'd issue, so I'm going to ignore it and just do whatever."

Either way it gives you a ton of information about the health and reliability of the project.