¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Obviously I’m biased to say this but I have just filed a high-quality feature request for a software project I am interested to adopt. What makes it great™:

• describe concisely and precisely what you’re looking for — being concise is essential: we live in a fast-paced world. If no one looks at your FR, then it won’t move forward. Period. — being precise (unambiguous) is important to avoid back-and-forth and potential bikeshedding — I prefer to write it using my own words. Using an LLM risks making your FR robotic and unappealing for anyone to consider. YMMV.

• describe why — what is the raison d’être of the feature? What is the rationale behind it? How does it make the project better? How does it improve the developer experience?

• (optional, but highly recommended) suggest how and offer to address it — Everyone wants everything, but few people want to put in the effort to see changes take place. Your FR has a much higher chance of becoming reality if you volunteer your time, effort and expertise to implement the feature yourself, rather than demanding someone (likely an unpaid volunteer) to do so for you.

In my experience it’s better to file an issue / ticket / FR first, prior to sending a pull request. You cannot know in advance whether the FR is welcome by the project or its maintainers. Sending in a PR just to see its underlying raison d’être be rejected is a waste of time, besides being a frustrating experience.

Furthermore, the ticket doubles-down as documentation for the PR description / commit message in the future, should the FR be accepted. The small overhead of time to file a ticket is a reasonable trade-off.

Now, even if your FR is great and very reasonable¹, there’s absolutely no guarantee:

• you will even get a reply in the first place²
• back-and-forth chatter will be quick and responsive
• the maintainers / developers will agree with your sense of ‘usefulness’
• the maintainers / developers will agree with how you believe it should be tackled or implemented
• your follow-up PR will even be reviewed and, let alone, merged
• your merged PR will make it into a new point release

Life is hard. Nonetheless, do not give up! Open source software is beautiful and serendipitous. :)