Not sure if this is the right place for this, but I wanted to raise a communication concern about the huggingface_hub project.
I’ve now had two experiences where I put significant effort into reporting bugs, reproducing them, and suggesting fixes, only to have the contributions silently ignored. Not rejected with reasoning, not redirected to a separate issue, just no
response at all.
The most recent example: I flagged a crash bug on Fix custom `tqdm_class` silently broken in non-TTY environments by hanouticelina · Pull Request #4056 · huggingface/huggingface_hub · GitHub with a reproduction and a specific fix. The PR was merged without any acknowledgment of the comment. A similar
pattern happened with feat: Add download progress callback & fix tqdm_class silenced in non-TTY by tobocop2 · Pull Request #4051 · huggingface/huggingface_hub · GitHub .
I’ve since opened additional issues and PRs:
Issues:
PRs:
Each includes reproduction steps, root cause analysis, and before/after demos. I’m not expecting an immediate response on these, but I’m flagging the pattern in hopes that it isn’t continued.
I understand maintainers are busy and not every suggestion can be adopted. That’s completely fine. What I’m asking for is basic acknowledgment, even a brief “thanks, we’ll track this separately” or “this isn’t the right approach, here’s why”
would be enough. Silence after genuine effort is what discourages outside contributors from reporting bugs in the future.
If there’s something I’m doing wrong in how I’m contributing, I genuinely want to know. I’d rather be told directly than left wondering. But if the work is sound and the concerns are valid, I don’t understand why silence is the response.
I appreciate this library and want to keep contributing. I’m raising this because I’d rather flag the pattern than quietly disengage.
bumping for visibility as I’ve still not heard back. I’ve been babysitting my open PR’s and updating them with main daily and I don’t know I should be doing this anymore. @Wauplin
bumping for visibility as I’ve still not heard back. I’ve been babysitting my open PR’s and updating them with main daily and I don’t know I should be doing this anymore. @Wauplin
Maybe Wauplin is busy…
I don’t know exactly how many HF staff members are diligently checking their HF Hub notifications, but if merges and rejections of PRs are significantly delayed, the drift increases, creating more work for everyone—and nobody benefits. Not benefiting is one thing, but I think this is an issue that affects the efficiency of OSS development and the morale of volunteer developers…
I’m not looking for an answer this time. I’m just asking that you at least share this situation with the HF staff… @hysts @meganariley @lhoestq
really appreciate you @John6666
Thanks. I have no idea who to contact. Being busy is totally acceptable honestly, but being ignored how I was is strange. I don’t think that this is the situation because the maintainers are heavily active and responding to other issues and landing PR’s ahead of mine daily. I called out a real crash concern and it was ignored completely and is still being ignored and I just find that to be a little baffling. I think it’s just a communication / culture issue and I agree at this point that it makes sense to raise it with the HF staff.
Yeah.
Since I don’t have much experience using GitHub, I’m not sure whether this is a common practice within the GitHub, HF, and recent OSS communities.
However, I felt that if this kind of situation is being inadvertently overlooked, it’s not a good thing.
If it’s not an oversight but rather intentional or due to a lack of resources, then that’s a matter for the individual company or person to decide, so I shouldn’t really comment… but since I have no idea which is the case, I’m not sure what to make of it.
I am sure it’s common, but ultimately it’s still a problem. I’ve contributed to several projects throughout the years and this is the first time I’ve ever personally encountered this type of communication.
I have been filing detailed bug reports, creating PR’s with bug fixes, and also catching bugs before they got merged and I’d expect at least even an emoji reaction at this point to know that whatever I did was acknowledged.
For example, one of my bug fixes is to xet-core. It’s also not merged but at minimum it got acknowledged and that’s all I’d ask for when someone puts in the effort [BUG-FIX]: download progress not reported to Python during file transfers by tobocop2 · Pull Request #791 · huggingface/xet-core · GitHub so I appreciate that the maintainer responded. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect the same for the huggingface_hub project.
how does one reach a moderator here? is there any course of action I can take at this point? It’s been a couple weeks now since I posted this, and I have no idea if it’s worth the trouble anymore
Hmm… The only way to contact the moderators is basically via email. Other than that, well, it’s basically volunteer work for the moderators. website@huggingface.co
)