![]() ![]() The inherent implication of such a question is that you're trying to do the thing you're asking about. I mean, it's technically an option, but it doesn't quite address the question on how you should approach this. Just doing the PR directly saves both you and them some time and effort. You'd spend more time trying to get them to look at everything and asking if your correction is correct, than you would opening the PR itself. In this case, a simple PR for typo fixes doesn't really need clarification, the maintainer can look at the PR itself and decide whether they need to or not. if you're unsure if something is unintended behavior or not. The only reason why I'd consider email the maintainer was to clarify something, e.g. Whether you corrected a typo or changed some code is irrelevant as to how GitHub works and how its members coordinate changes they've made. If emailing someone and having them make the changes were the way to go, GitHub (and versioning systems in general) would lose their primary purpose. The entire point of GitHub is that you can cooperatively coordinate changes to source code. Send the maintainer an email with the proposed corrections.In your particular case, "fixed some typos" accurately sums it up. The summary field should be kept for a human-readable short summation of what this PR contains. That information is already visible when looking at the changes themselves, and any pull request reviewer is obviously going to be looking at the changes that were made. Correct the typos and submit a pull request with the position of each correction in the summary field.I hope this is useful, but no worries if it's not" or something to that effect if you're unsure. It's completely ok to write something like "This is my first pull request. Lastly, GitHub is fundamentally just humans talking to each other. Ultimately, to assuage your concerns, reviewing and merging a simple pull request is a quite quick and painless operation for a maintainer-look at the diff and click a button. The fact that you're asking this question and are concerned with respecting the maintainer's time makes it clear that your intentions are noble. Having multiple typos in a README, assuming they are real typos and not regional spelling differences, is less than ideal, and you're providing a material improvement by fixing them. If you were only fixing a typo in a comment, seemed to be changing documentation for no real reason, or arbitrarily rewriting a bit of code without making any particular improvement, that's the sort of thing that could raise eyebrows.īut in your case, your PR seems like it would genuinely improve the software. Hacktoberfest is over, and that specific problem has abated (the amount of spam caused them to change the way the program worked after a few days to make it opt-in for project maintainers), at least until next year, but that incident gives a bit of context into how many maintainers think about pull requests: PRs exist to improve the software, and PRs that seem to exist just for the sake of changing something without a clear purpose or benefit may be frowned upon, especially in bulk. It was particularly noticeable this year, with some projects receiving a dozen of these in the first day of the event, which caused a lot of consternation among project maintainers and blog posts like DigitalOcean's Hacktoberfest is Hurting Open Source. A number of these involved trivial changes or vandalism to README files, some inspired by a demonstration on a YouTube channel.Īt worst, we're talking about things like this "improve docs" PR, which only added unnecessary periods to comments, or this one, which added an odd and unnecessary header to a README. Wonderful as it is to encourage more people to get into open source, offering a reward in return for gameable metrics and packing it all into one month resulted in many projects receiving a flood of low-quality pull requests that were perceived by some maintainers as spam. Some context that may or may not be relevant.Ī cloud hosting provider named DigitalOcean hosts an event every year called Hacktoberfest to encourage people to contribute to open source projects in exchange for a T-shirt. ![]()
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