---
title: "Bullshit Talks, Code Walks?"
description: "More pull requests, less mailing list chatter -- most projects would kill for that problem."
date: 2011-02-05
url: https://claylo.dev/articles/bullshit-talks-code-walks
---

Salvatore Sanfilippo, author of Redis, posted yesterday that [Pull requests are not conversations](http://antirez.com/post/pull-requests-are-not-conversations.html). It's an interesting read, and certainly valid for a subset of open source projects.

What Salvatore overlooks is that very few projects reach the popularity that Redis has. The other 98% of projects have mailing lists filled with users complaining about why the code doesn't do this or that, which creates a lot of noise for happier users, and creates angst for the project maintainers. (Or in most cases, maintainer.)

In fact, Salvatore's post is in stark contrast to the other popular viewpoint: [Pull request or STFU](http://twitter.com/#!/funkatron/status/24597823303450624), a sentiment that's even [available as a fine fashion statement](http://twitter.com/#!/funkatron/status/25195449749078016).

The reality is that you can't have it both ways. You either have a backlog of pull requests to sift through and (possibly) engage in communication around, or you have a backlog of potential contributors chattering on your mailing list, most of whom are trying to convince the maintainer to do work they are unwilling or unable to do themselves.

I think most open source maintainers will agree an overload of pull requests is a high-class, edge-case problem. We want more pull requests, please, and less bullshit.