I've had a similar experience and I found it to be equally frustrating.
I contributed some minor enhancements to a simple helper script, one that just made a small part of development a little smoother. I created a pull request, added a good description of what I had done, and sent it off. The author got back to me pretty quickly with a few changes he wanted done, I happily obliged, and then sat and waited for a week.
Then over the following few weeks he proceeded to nitpick and ask for changes that really just amounted to over-engineering for some future possibility he imagined for his 200 line script. I will also point out that beyond the initial commits he had made six months ago, he hadn't touched the project since.
Regardless, I obliged, made every change he asked for. That was almost a month ago and he has now gone completely silent, the pull request sitting idle.
What I learned from the experience is that beyond the points the author made, the balance of power in these projects is often an insurmountable barrier. For instance, if I say something that pisses this guy off, he simply ignores my pull request and it sits in limbo forever. Or I fork his project and other users are forced figure out which version is the best (great example of this is the shitty state of AWS libraries in the Go language).
All in all, this experience isn't enough to turn me off to contributing to open source projects. It does however make me think twice about when it's worth trying and when I might just let my private forked copy stay that way.
I contributed some minor enhancements to a simple helper script, one that just made a small part of development a little smoother. I created a pull request, added a good description of what I had done, and sent it off. The author got back to me pretty quickly with a few changes he wanted done, I happily obliged, and then sat and waited for a week.
Then over the following few weeks he proceeded to nitpick and ask for changes that really just amounted to over-engineering for some future possibility he imagined for his 200 line script. I will also point out that beyond the initial commits he had made six months ago, he hadn't touched the project since.
Regardless, I obliged, made every change he asked for. That was almost a month ago and he has now gone completely silent, the pull request sitting idle.
What I learned from the experience is that beyond the points the author made, the balance of power in these projects is often an insurmountable barrier. For instance, if I say something that pisses this guy off, he simply ignores my pull request and it sits in limbo forever. Or I fork his project and other users are forced figure out which version is the best (great example of this is the shitty state of AWS libraries in the Go language).
All in all, this experience isn't enough to turn me off to contributing to open source projects. It does however make me think twice about when it's worth trying and when I might just let my private forked copy stay that way.