Chapter 4 Engaging with the community
Engaging with owners/maintainers and the broader coding community to identify and participate in discussion of issues.
4.1 Complain or Fix?
Many simply write issues about what they want to see fixed or improved, but often the response is “put in a PR.” Instead, why not write the issue and present your proposed fix at the same time? That changes the tone from “here is problem”, and even better is asking “is this a problem?” Including the fix instead changes the conversation positively “is this a solution?” which is more efficient.
If you can’t solve the problem, then of course you are not expected to proposed a fix it, but an offer to fix or help goes a long way.
4.2 Requesting help/features or reporting bugs (using reprexes).
4.2.1 Example: How ask package maintainers to accommodate the global dateline and very high latitudes
- https://github.com/rstudio/leaflet/issues/495
- This is a great example of an obtuse issue. There is an R package “MapView” this is a 1-stop-mapping thing, super easy. Someone there raised an issue. MapView depends on RLeaflet (I just know this, it doesn’t say that anywhere in the issue). The leader of the MapView project realized that it was an RLeaflet problem, so copy/pasted the issue into the RLeaflet project. I say RLeaflet because that project actually heavily depends on the original leaflet.js for javascript, which most people just called “leaflet”. Another interesting thing is that the first commenter (Darcy somebody) says that polygons are fine, which does not need to be said because the OP already said it was ok, but no one piled on and said “he already said that.” Note the issue was raised in 2015 and no one was assigned and it was not fixed. The issue was reference in 2018 for new issue (created by Rstudio) to fix it, and I only know that because in the new issue they referenced the issue number. but even that one was not fixed. also in the original issue is an extensive post to show a work-around. That info now just =sits here in a github issue. A question for the group: what should have been done by the project to deal with this issue (hints, create an issue to add the work-around in the documentation, when creating a new issue, close the original and reference the new one.. possibly tag it as “wontfix” or better tag it in a project roadmap to make it clear they care about it and will deal with at some future time.
- https://github.com/rstudio/leaflet/issues/225
4.2.2 Example: ggmap package
Issue with Pacific mapping with ggmap: https://github.com/dkahle/ggmap/issues/326
* (solution is to change the projection, the software is not the problem, but is it in the docs?)
* Another person had a question/problem but it was totally ignored: https://github.com/dkahle/ggmap/issues/295
+ Why is that?
+ Is there a document for this package describing how to participate in the community?
+ Are the volunteers following the lead of the owner?
+ Who is fine ignoring these?