How to handle collaborators on an open source project?
How to handle collaborators on an open source project?
What are some good rules to follow when handling people who want to collaborate on a project that is on your personal repo?
It looks like GitHub doesn't allow fine control of permissions unless it is an organization repo. I looked around and a lot of other projects (specifically browser extensions) still live on the main dev's account. I don't have any reason to doubt the people who want to help, but it might be nice to know what the best practices are.
Should I add everyone as a collaborator? This runs into the issue above where I can't limit permissions.
Should everyone push contributions from their forks? In that case, how would people work together on a particular feature.
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As a contributor, I never particularly cared about permissions if I participate in a project with a few patches. It becomes useful when you are diagnosing a CI problem, etc. and you need to push a lot of tweaks to discover where the bug is located.
More generally, treat contributors like you want to be treated. Try to be responsive, compassionate, guide them through the process of having a PR merged, be ready to fix a minor mess or two, congratulate them on a job well done.
Open development is as much a story of people as a story of code.
Thank you for sharing! This is my first project like this so I've got lots to learn. I'm going to try and contribute to a few other ones so try and learn what it's like