The new contribution policy I'm considering for my open-source projects:

"PRs are only accepted for trivial fixes (documentation typos, fixing broken links, that sort of thing), but not for code. Please file an issue instead, if you've found a problem with the software. And if you wish to become a contributor, please reach out to me."

The reason for this approach: "one-off" PRs often cost more time to review and coordinate changes on, than it would take to just do it myself. Which would be fine, *if* there was a reasonable chance of the contributor sticking around, and putting the newly learned things into practice on future contributions.

But they almost never do, and it's not sustainable to put this kind of effort into an endless stream of one-off contributors who I will never see again. The whole point is to distribute the workload, not increase it. Having long-term contributor relationships also makes things like funding (of contributor work) much easier to deal with.

Thoughts?

It's all song and dance, to me. A pull request is analagous to @'ing you here and saying "Please pull this! Here's what's wrong!" Filing an issue is analagous to @'ing you here and saying "Here's what's wrong! Please pull this!" Github et. al. just dress it up as something fancy, to make you think you'll need to use their centralized website in order to effectively work together.

That said, given the assumption that you're going to do everything through Github, an Issue is probably better than a Pull Request, just because it goes onto their list of issues webpage. (Which here, is analagous to using a tag like #issue)
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@cy I do wonder if the (appearance of) lock-in is specifically why Github has stuck with its PR-based contribution workflow, even though there seem to be extremely few projects on it for which it is actually working well

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Couldn't tell you. I've never seen anyone actually doing a programming project using the Fediverse. It'd probably take having separate accounts dedicated to that sort of thing, which would be great if there was a multi-account Fediverse client that... really would make a good programming project.
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