There's a saying in Open Source communities "Patches Welcome". However, I find that some sorts of patches are more welcome than others.
Recently I've been working on putting strptime into POSIX. In response of one of my patches on the perl5-porters@ mailing list, Nicholas Clark wrote me a reply, attached to which was a new set of unit tests, most of which the code did not currently pass, but ought to.
As patches go, this is one of the most useful patches I have ever received. He didn't try (too much) to fix the code, didn't spend that long explaining the problems. He just sent a unit test. Now let me explain why this is useful.
With a unit test script, I can have it run against any version of the code I write. I can run it every minute until it works. I can run it at 3 in the morning during one of my late-night hacking sessions. I can run it on the underground train on my commute to work. It is close, immediate, convenient.
A discussion over a patch to the code alone would be at least an order of magnitude slower than this. People keep different time schedules. People aren't always available online. People don't always get what each other means the first time, leading to more back-and-forth discussion until an agreement is reached.
Without wishing to upset too many members of the Open Source community that might disagree with me, I would say "Patches (to code) Welcome, but unit tests, examples, or documentation would be preferred." I can easily hack up some code to pass the tests you supply, whereas if you just supply some code it's much harder for me to work out what you actually wanted.
