Contributing to FLOSS projects: Jenkins vs. Arch/Pacman


The comparison is not entirely fair, because the pull request I submitted to Jenkins (a continuous integration server) affects about 400 lines of code, while the informal e-mail I sent to the Pacman (Arch Linux package manager) development list only affects 2 lines of code.

But I submitted (and revised, several times, based on feedback), the Jenkins pull request November 16th, almost 3 months ago. It still has not been merged, although all tests pass, and demonstrably many users have run into the problem that it was created to fix. As far as I can tell, nobody takes any interest in it. They currently have 125 pull requests outstanding.

In comparison, I pointed out a bug on the Pacman development list last night, and it was merged this morning before I got up.

Pacman     Jenkins

Guess where my future pull requests go.