Pull requests

So, let’s talk pull requests.

I think the one thing that can make Homey really great is the community, and the additional value that developers can provide to Homey and it’s users.

In March last year, I made a driver for a device for one of the top Homey device apps.
It was my first contribution to the homey open source community, and I was excited to be able to both create a driver for my new device, but also to be able to share that with everyone else.
The pull request is still sitting there untouched. And so are 10+ other pull requests for that app. The oldest one will be one year old in a few days, and I have been waiting for that to happen before writing this post.

When I wrote that first driver, I thought that maybe I could write more as well.
Or maybe even move on to making completely new apps.

I have not.

My initial thought is that it might very well be a waste of my spare time, which I do not have a lot of.
I am sad that I feel this way, because I would rather not. I would love to contribute.

Maybe I am just a sore old sob, but I am afraid that others may feel the same.

I think it is very important that contributions from the community are handled and looked into, or they may stop coming in, and that will be way worse than just having my driver sitting untouched for years.

/jb

2 Likes

Sad to hear there is no response, seems you really want to help the community,
did you also post your Github URL here on the forum, so also other readers/users can test your solution?
did you contact Athom via mail and asked why the Pull Request(s) is not used (yet)?

I asked in their Slack after almost 4 months, where as they told me to send some dutch food (I can’t remember what it was called, but I remember I had to google it find out what it was) to someone and it would get handled. I guess it was a joke, but I don’t really find it funny at this point.

I think I also contacted them through email, because I was also pointed towards this document for device support: https://goo.gl/forms/6GpSTBD3tpHNgVir2.
Okay, nevermind, it’s so old the link doesn’t even work anymore.

I might also add that multiple people have actually asked for support for that particular device in the app store too.

That’s sad. I think it was about Kibbeling? :wink:
A thing that happens to me sometimes, is that I don’t get any notifications from Github when I receive a pull request. I have to login to Github and check what new messages there are to see support tickets and pull requests.
They should listen more carefully if you even asked on Slack, though. Very demotivating.

On the other hand, pull requests sometimes are hard to process. I once had a request that overwrote a lot of code that was necessary, twice I received a pull request that made the app crash…
So it still requires a lot of work and testing. Nevertheless, pull requests should be handled ASAP in my opinion, before the original code gets modified again by the original writer.

Kibbeling sounds about right!

Pull requests and code reviews are both part of my regular work day, so I understand very well that it is a lot of work. Especially in the case of drivers, where you probably can’t test properly without the actual hardware.

But maybe they haven’t been properly classified as work? If they’re nobody’s responsibility it only makes sense that they are not handled.