In a previous essay I wrote about the process behind my Hacktoberfest 2019 contributions. It is now worthwhile to make a quick follow-up, at this point, at the status of those contributions.

It is relevant to start by mentioning I made a bit of a mess of my contributions, right after I wrote up the article. I tried to correct an issue with the email and user of the contributions and re-wrote the history of my git repositories…bummer! That forced me to close my initial PRs and having to open up new ones - and re-writing all the changes I had made.

I had opened PR #4476, PR #4499 and PR #4500. PR #4499 had to be closed and re-opened as PR #4516. PR #4500 had to be closed and re-opened as PR #4517. That makes a total of 5 PRs, of which only 3 were actually valid for review by PyInstaller’s maintainers.

PR #4476 was accepted, within a two-week period. This seems to be a fairly usual time frame, by looking at previous PR reviews in the project. There was a minor wrapping issues, which the maintainers of PyInstaller promptly resolved and pushed to my branch. PR #4516 was merged within approximately the same two-week period, without any need for further modification. PR #4517 took a bit longer to merge because I had made an error when creating the changelog entry - plus there was a need for a small lint correction.

I was very happy with the end result, getting all 3 PRs approved and merged. I was surprised with how friendly the maintainers of PyInstaller were, even with the small errors. I was also thankful they completely ignored my shenanigans of duplicating the PRs.

They should be an example for the entire community, how they deal with new contributors and their mistakes. That is one of the reasons why they have 280+ contributors on Github.

Now, looking towards the future, I hope I can be of more use to them by adding more hooks. Adding hooks seems to be something that I can do, without creating a lot of work for the maintainers in terms of reviews. But , it will also allow me to start understanding more of the codebase and contribute in different areas.