I came across this couple of times before and I always wanted to blog about it. In my daily work life I see many developers which just don’t get Open Source. For example, some discover issues in libraries they use. But they don’t fix them. They don’t even inform the maintainers of a library. Yet others have a great new use-case to address. Again, the library doesn’t support it. Thus, they write a great deal of new code to address their issue and eventually run into new ones (for example, see this thread).
But it’s that darn simple!
- Checkout the library from source. You can use a well known tag/branch for this.
- Get in touch with the maintainers and implement your modifications.
- Build and release your modified version until a new official release is available.