I Created an Issue in a Flask-RESTful Repository, You Won't Believe What Happened Next
Two and a half years ago (Dec 4, 2015) I’ve written about a minor problem in Flask-RESTful, that puzzled and amused me. An issue was created on the same day. I then went on with my life, hoping for someone to step in and fix this trivial design inconsistency. Several people including the repo maintainer enthusiastically expressed support for proposed changes but no code was ever commited.
Fast forward almost a year (Oct 30, 2016), I noticed this issue while skimming through my Github activities and decided to open a PR. I wasn’t using Flask at the moment, so I was doing it for the greater good. Having commited some code and hoping for the maintainer to review it ASAP, I switched to other commitments. Needles to say there was no review in several days, weeks and even months. Feeling more and more irritated with the whole affair, I emailed the maintaner and several other people, whose PRs have been merged recently - to no avail. I gave up and decided to finally let it go.
Fast forward almost two years (Jun 6, 2018) the maintainer of the repository suddenly started reviewing the code. It is now merged for good and I’m glad to have contributed to the project, but somehow this whole ordeal of trying to commit my trivial change for almost 2.5 years makes me worried about the ever-increasing entropy of Open Source. Perhaps several thousand new libs and frameworks were created last couple of minutes. Do we have the guts to support and maintain it all? Could it be that we got carried away with a sexy idea of starting our own new thing and developed intolerance for the actual grind and commitment?