I appreciate all form of contribution, but for some contributors a greater sense of awareness about how OSS works would go a long way. The more you leave undone in a pull request or the more you leave unanswered in a bug report, the more “work in progress” your contribution adds to a project.
So for example, say you report a bug, but you only explain it with a sentence or two of english -- no stack trace, no minimal example reproducing the problem, and no tests. At that point, there’s nothing I can do except ask you to provide more information to help me investigate further, unless your problem is very obvious the moment I look at it.
Once we at least have the means to reproduce a bug, we need to make sure it’s isolated and not coming from some lower level problem. That means writing further sets of examples, and poking around in the source until we’re fairly sure where the bug is coming from.
Once that source of the problem has been identified, we need to work on a fix, but we need to take care to make