This can also be one of the frustrating parts of open source.
Find something you don’t like? Fix it. Will the repo owner approve your pull request? Who knows. Maybe they’re a bit absentee. Maybe they view the original behavior as working as designed. Maybe your design doesn’t fit their architectural model, so they’ll (eventually) heavily refactor your changes and merge them in.
You can always stand up a fork, but keeping those two at feature parity and going in the same general direction can become harder and harder with time.
That’s not to say not to try! But it also means reaching out to the repo owners/maintainers before making your first change.
Whenever I feel like this I think back to how many of those “simple” bugs I’ve had to fix in my own code and how many years it took off my life expectancy and feel a little connection with the poor developer who is probably currently losing their hair over this too
Unfortunately my bank, government, national health, surgery, local shops, food delivery services, etc. don’t open source their code. It’d be nice if they did however.
They wouldn’t want you to know it all depends on a Frankensteined chunk of spaghetti’d COBOL that hasn’t been updated since a guy they forgot about set it up before he retired in like 1996. And they’re just betting that, if they don’t look at it too hard, it won’t oopsie a cascade of critical failures.
As a software engineer, annoying bugs that should be so simple to fix are so frustrating! I wish I could just have a crack and fixing it myself!
That’s what I love so much about open source. Currently have a fork of kiTTY going, working on tracking down a little bug I found in my daily use.
This can also be one of the frustrating parts of open source.
Find something you don’t like? Fix it. Will the repo owner approve your pull request? Who knows. Maybe they’re a bit absentee. Maybe they view the original behavior as working as designed. Maybe your design doesn’t fit their architectural model, so they’ll (eventually) heavily refactor your changes and merge them in.
You can always stand up a fork, but keeping those two at feature parity and going in the same general direction can become harder and harder with time.
That’s not to say not to try! But it also means reaching out to the repo owners/maintainers before making your first change.
100%, sounds interesting! I’m going to spend some time tomorrow looking at a bug in the jellyfin android TV app related to DTS audio over HDMI.
Rock on! Look at us, contributing to the tools we use
Whenever I feel like this I think back to how many of those “simple” bugs I’ve had to fix in my own code and how many years it took off my life expectancy and feel a little connection with the poor developer who is probably currently losing their hair over this too
Definitely true, I dread to think about how much tech debt these companies have. 😬
If you only use Free Open Source software, you can!
Unfortunately my bank, government, national health, surgery, local shops, food delivery services, etc. don’t open source their code. It’d be nice if they did however.
They wouldn’t want you to know it all depends on a Frankensteined chunk of spaghetti’d COBOL that hasn’t been updated since a guy they forgot about set it up before he retired in like 1996. And they’re just betting that, if they don’t look at it too hard, it won’t oopsie a cascade of critical failures.
Funnily enough, the one you’d expect this from, the bank, I used to work for, it’s all Go and running on k8s in aws.
There are FOSS core-banking systems (aka CBS) like Apache-Fineract
True open source software runs on frustrated developers
But yeah, that is a really nice part of FOSS. I have myself been in situations where I just went and fixed a big myself because it annoyed me lol