Friedrich Vandenberghe (Jun 03 2026 at 06:19): Friedrich Vandenberghe (Jun 03 2026 at 06:19):In the documentation on contributing, there's a section (Avoiding Trivial Pull Requests) which says the following:
we request that contributors don't open Pull Requests with trivial changes, such as typo fixes in documentation. Instead, those changes should be included, as separate commits, in more substantive Pull Requests.
While I understand the rationale behind this, I wonder what is concretely expected in this case. Should the contributor ask in each PR if they can piggyback their (trivial) commits? Should they make an issue detailing their changes and ask which PR would be best for this?
Till Schneidereit (Jun 03 2026 at 08:06):I think it boils down to "if all you have are trivial changes, ignore them", paired with "when folding trivial fixes into a non-trivial PR, have them as their own commit and mention their existence in the PR description."
Really, this rule exists to give us a rationale for rejecting profile-building PRs by bots and bad actors first and foremost, and, perhaps surprisingly, this is the first time a genuine request for clarification comes up. If you can think of ways to improve the language, let us know!
Friedrich Vandenberghe (Jun 03 2026 at 11:11):What do you think of the following wording?
As such, we request that contributors don't open Pull Requests with trivial changes, such as typo fixes in documentation. Instead, those changes can be proposed on Zulip. Alternatively, you can combine the trivial fixes into a commit for a non-trivial Pull Request. Wasmtime maintainers will close Pull Requests containing only trivial changes with a reference to this section of the docs.
The intent behind this is that I assume it's too much effort for an individual to post small typo's here, and also just not that much to gain for profile-building bots. However, if someone finds a bunch of them or finds a typo that makes the text ambiguous to read, they could mention it here. Then someone could fix it in their non-trivial PR if they wish to do so.
Till Schneidereit (Jun 08 2026 at 16:49):While I appreciate the thought behind it, I think in practice simply living with the typos is the better balance than encouraging people to propose changes on Zulip. Even without any malicious intent, triaging trivial changes is never a good use of maintainers' time, and surprisingly costly. Then having to go and actually create a patch and open a PR (for which we'll run about 1.5 hours of CI time across many runners before it lands) isn't worth the marginal benefit of a trivial fix.
I do like the other changes though, and would land them if you open a PR and CC me :slight_smile:
Last updated: Jul 29 2026 at 05:03 UTC