Hello, I am a third-year computer science student currently enrolled in a course titled Open Source Software Development. I have chosen PyTorch as my project. This is my first time contributing to such a project, and I would like to understand what kind of pull requests (PRs) maintainers appreciate—such as documentation improvements or bug fixes—and what types of PRs they tend to dislike. I am willing to undertake basic, tedious, or otherwise unappealing tasks. I will apreciate it if someone can give me some guidances.
If I submit a pull request just for fixing a minor grammar error, will I be considered disruptive?
maybe start with GitHub · Where software is built
Hey,
I only recently started to contribute myself and must say my PRs were reviewed very kindly with valuable feedback.
I am by no means experienced, but I think it might make sense to go over an entire file to correct for grammatical errors instead (especially if it is in the comments), as this should not hurt the readability of the PR.
Appart from that: I would recommend you to maybe look into contributing to the docs/testing side of pyTorch if you are already familiar with the Python API as it can be a bit easier to start with. There might be open issues in that area where you can simply add a test case or improve the readability of the output.
I hope this helps!
Best
Johannes
Thanks for the reply, I thought no one would see this post again, I recently submitted some PRs for PyTorch for documentation improvements and bug modifications, I would like to ask what type of PRs you generally submit and what the maintainers have to say about this. Thank you.
No worries,
I had two PRs merged into pytorch. One just adjusting some tests to accommodate a new backend. The second one was then integrating this new backend. So one was pure python while the other was in the c++ code, to be specific in the ATen linalg backend. Rn I am working on another PR to further improve the testing. Personally I found the comments incredibly helpful as it allowed me to fix issues I overlooked. Also I always keep an eye on CI to be able to adress issues arising there quickly.
If you want to check out the two PRs and see what the maintainers had to say, here are the links:
python testing PR
new cuda eig backend
Thanks for the suggestion, I currently only have two PRs that have been merged to fix the syntax error in the documentation, one PR that fixes the bug has been approved but has not yet been scheduled to merge the process, and I plan to write more test cases for PyTorch but don’t know where to start. I once submitted a PR for writing test cases on an attempt, but I don’t think it solves any problems or provides any help, could you please help me take a look at my PR and give me some suggestions, any suggestions please feel free to let me know.