I’ve forked an app I use myself to add what I thought would be a (relatively) small fix. I then realised it was sort of left in the middle of a redesign/rewrite caused by dependency updates changing / breaking things and decided I needed to finish that if I wanted to see my code on a release. Along the way I got carried away and now the fork feels too large to pull request.
The changes I made don’t meaningfully change the app structure but they required multiple refactorings/rewrites and extrapolation of what the redesign was trying to do.
The original developer is active but haven’t committed to the repo in a long time. What should I do? I just want people to use the code I wrote. Do I PR and see what they say? Do I make another branch of its main and try to add my changes in more digestible chunks? Do I change the package name and release a build myself? I don’t want to figure out a new name / logo etc, especially since the app is largely the same.
There are issues on the original repo about bugs I fixed. I’d like to point them to my fork, but that feels like shilling an unnecessarily made fork. And it doesn’t feel right to drop a huge PR on the dev and expect them to accept it or even reply neither.
What do?
Give it to the dev, and explain the situation. Let them know it seems too big/complex of a PR, but you’re willing to make additional changes, or break up PR to make it more palatable for merging. It’s in the dev’s hands after that.
I don’t think you should release your own fork without at least trying to work with the original project.
Make sure all your commits have detailed commit messages so that the dev can follow what you were doing (upgrading deps, refactor because xyz, etc.) Don’t just record what was changed, explain why it was changed.
anyway that’s what I would do.
Create a PR and describe the situation. Ask if they’ll accept the PR as-is or if they’d accept the refactors separately.
^ This
Gives the dev both options and shows you’re not trying to give them a bunch of new work, but do needed work for them.
If you can, fork it again but this time only fix the one bug with minimal changes and submit that as a PR. Then ask the maintainer about submitting more to fix the other bugs, and doing some refactoring.
This respects the PR atomicity principle.
This should be done anyway. One commit per fix, one PR per issue.
Yep, this is the way. A PR should have a single focus. So your updates may end up being multiple PRs.
I’d say ask the original developer directly. Getting your changes merged upstream should be the preferred option for you, the original dev and the users. If everything goes right, you both could figure out a way to do this, maybe by re-introducing your refactorings and fixes one by one in smaller pull requests. Maybe you could become a maintainer in the process and support the original dev long term so everybody wins.
If the original developer doesn’t respond or declines you could think about bringing your own fork forward. Think about the consequences though, the original dev might get frustrated by a competing fork and abandon the project completely. The users on the other hand might be confused or insecure about which version to choose. Your fork must offer a lot for them to jump ship and switch.
Generally I’d say open source is about working together, not against one another, so just shoot them a message and see where it goes.
Great point. Makes me think of trillium next notes which continues to supply nothing new even though the original is archived
The general rule of thumb is, if a single PR changes lots of things then it won’t be accepted.
I’d suggest breaking it into multiple PRs and possibly reaching out to someone on the core team to explain what you were trying to do and how you’ve done it kinda like RFC. Ideally this would’ve be done before you started with a major change but still.
I see you also mentioned original devs are no longer active. In that case you can send PRs but don’t expect them to get merged but instead if you are still using it, try to update and fix other things as you see fit and people will see it and start using your repo and if at any time original devs comeback maybe they can official handover project to you or accept all your PRs. And this is totally OK as long as you are not breaking any license original devs had, that’s what forks are for. If you want you can rename and do rebranding but that is not necessary unless original devs had trademarked the logs and stuff and that original repo is completely dead.
Like other commenters have said, start by asking the upstream developer (whether that’s by sending a message with a link to the fork or by sending a mega-PR that says you don’t expect it to be merged as-is in the description). They should be the best judge of how they’d prefer to handle it. The thing I’d add is that you should try to avoid taking it personally if their preferred approach isn’t one you think is a good idea. Sometimes good fixes end up never merged because of disagreements becoming too heated even if everyone’s basically on the same page about the fox being good. There’s also a decent chance that your refactors are things the upstream developer explicitly doesn’t want and would otherwise have done them themselves and implemented the same fix, too, or they don’t agree that your fix is good enough. They won’t want to be on the hook for maintaining contributions that use approaches and code style that they don’t like, and that’s okay. They also might know something you don’t about their project that would make something that’s obviously a good idea to you obviously a bad idea to them.
Basically, just try and remember that if it’s a hobby project, it makes progress when the maintainer is having a good time, and gets abandoned when they’re not anymore, so try and avoid making a mess and having arguments when they’re the one that’ll have to deal with any fallout from any mistakes.
