Unpopular opinion! Submitting patches doesn't help OSS maintainers

‪@FilippoValsorda‬ shares his (potentially) unpopular opinion on the "Go Time" podcast. Full audio 👉 gotime.fm/313
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[@virtuous-sloth]

Would it be more accurate to say "submitting feature patches doesn't help OSS maintainers"? Most of Fillippo's objections are for feature patches only.
A bug patch presumably makes a fairly concentrated statement about where and what the bug is and how to fix it, which, unless it is terribly wrong, should be a help to a developer who has not looked at the bug but would eventually be charged with fixing it anyway, I would think.

[@bigutubefan2738]

Ideally it's fairly concentrated yes. But if it was a bad bug, or the contributor got carried away with wild redesigns nobody in charge asked them for, the maintainer is under no obligation to merge their PR.
Filippo's assuming they've added no tests too. The onus is on contributors to prove they didn't break anything else in the process of their fix.