Contributing to packages

The discussion on this has died down a bit but are there any plans by Unity to eventually allow pull requests on the github repos of their packages?

I imagine development could be a lot faster since there's so many super clever people willing to help improve Unity for nothing in return.

Could the licenses for packages be updated to allow this?

 

+1

 

+1

 

Thanks for the question @JakHussain! I'll ask the team and circle back once I have a definitive answer

 

Thanks, @okcompute_unity! So just to elaborate, is this something that's just trailing at the end of the backlog that the relevant teams hope to eventually get to "at some point" or is this a prioritised task that has not ETA but is actively being pushed internally?

 

What is a priority then?

 

This kind of thing is why Unity is building a reputation of half-doing something and then giving up and moving on.

Edit: My mistake, this is actually in reference to stuff said in a different thread.

 

So what exactly is the point of allowing public access to the github repos at all given that most / all of issues are being closed and this is "not a priority anymore" as you said?

Is there actually a plan to the whole package manager thing because its starting to look like there really isnt?

 

@GameDevCouple in unity's defence, the package manager as a concept was always more for them than it was for us since it enables their teams to be much more agile and work independently of each other and as a result, we get updates way faster to the point they only need two tech releases a year.

That being said, I agree that teasing us with visibility on github is just annoying. User issues are still tracked with the original issue tracker even for packages (and a lot of the time, unofficially on the forums) and documentation is further fragmented with the never updating readme files. I'm not saying they should keep their readmes up to date too but the point is that if we can't do anything with the public visibility of the packages on github apart from cloning early unstable versions of code, then it's no more valuable to us than dumpster diving through the locally downloaded package anyway.

XML commenting is what drives the docfx documentation sites. Even tiny stuff like that could be supported.

I also don't buy that it's JUST an infrastructure problem. If the SRP team are using github and from there, pushing to other internal services in Unity, then any external contributions on GitHub have nothing to do with that because it's at the repository level. I won't even own the IP to any changes I make in my pull requests. I'd be a collaborator sure but the license clearly states that the repo and everything in it belongs to Unity.

 

Apologies for the rant but the situation honestly does bother me a fair bit.

 

This isn't a defense at all when the package manager COULD provide that same benefit (in fact, more) to the end user as well.

 

Is there any update on this? Especially now that entities 0.50 has released and uses source generators, it would be amazing to be able to contribute to the source, improving source generation / compile time / performance of dots. All other packages would of course also be nice to be able to contribute to. Unity, let us help you become the best engine out there.