"Idling", carelessness, and initiative in the FLOSS community

The Pull Request of my contribution task, which implemented Discourse SSO’s profile background picture support, hasn’t been merged these weeks.

20+ days without any comment, I didn’t check nor do anything about the PR during that period. Ultimately, on May 5th I found it by accident that I’m sending an PR with master branch merged instead of rebased against. There was, long time before, already a notice by techAPJ about this mistake I made. After I fixed that, ZogStriP, a Discourse team member, pointed out another carelessness of mine, a piece of code repeated twice when I was making the rebase.

I now recognize that it’s a good manner to read development documentations and guidelines carefully, and then follow them. Although it is also important to communicate with other developers on my own initiative, beforehand understanding of contributing requirements will really save time. And I should prepare myself with developing tools like git.