I agree, but I'd make an exception for fixing typos, obvious bugs and tiny additional features. Sometimes the change takes less time that discussing in other channels, and sometimes it's easier to explain with code if you are not a native speaker.

I think that spending more of a weekend in a PR without checking before with the maintainers is a bad idea, because there is a big risk that is not merged and is a waste of time.

Also, each project has it's own weird rules, like code style, space vs tabs, changing whitespace in unrelated lines, adding tests, ... and a long list. Some are written explicitly, and some are just implicit rules. So sometimes it's difficult to make a PR that follows all the rules.

100% agreed. Things that are obvious to fix and have no design impact should be ok to PR and get accepted quickly.

Every rule has exceptions, and this is definitely one for the rule I described. Thank you for pointing reminding me and clarifying.

Yep. We had a PR for a single character typo. The submitter went to a lot of trouble, but the burden to the project really was as small as could be. No discussion, no open issue, just a PR with a one liner that could be reviewed in seconds and accepted with a click. Any other process would have been more work for the maintainers.

I guess this would probably solve the problem of you getting unsolicited contributions – by making you come off as such a gigantic raging arsehole that nobody would want to work with you again.

Perhaps? But if someone had that attitude, and couldn't be bothered to discuss design impacting changes with the devs who are making sweeping changes impacted by the contributor's change? In that case I don't want them on my project, because they are toxic, and probably toxic in other ways.

More people need to realize that Open Source projects are a gift from the authors to the software community. Other developers do not have the right to make changes, push for the development to go in a certain direction, etc. If an author wants that they'll turn stewardship over to a committee and maybe be part of such a committee. You have only two rights with Open Source work you want to work differently: fork it or forget about it (i.e., not use it). Anything else is a massive gift from the maintainer(s) and should be viewed as such.

And yeah, as you can tell from the last paragraph I'll proudly wear an Arsehole button to avoid wearing a Burnout button. Heck, to borrow from Bruce Lee in Snowcrash, I'd even wear a "12 Gauge" button to avoid burnout (button only though, the behavior is not for me).

That didn't work for Torvalds.