Note that it was rejected because I sent it into the wrong branch (we do use master these days) and so I even had to resubmit it https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/4308
I'm about to send in my 972nd PR now. The Rust book is 520 pages; that was the second version, the first of which was ~300 pages. Quite a big difference from +34/-2. I'm at +142,087/-166,524 lines to the main repo now, and #12 overall contributor.
Yes, not everyone who sends in a small patch will become a core contributor. But some will. It's a numbers game.
This is a great real world example. However I would rate your first PR as very good... Documentation improvement, with examples, is something which is very hard to get. Btw in general, I totally agree with the basic idea of trying to merge trivial patches. I go a step forward and I merge "just typos" PRs even if they have the bad effect of breaking other very important PRs sometimes, because a trivial break will be a trivial rebase anyway and typos cannot stay there forever.
From this POV btw Github does a terrible job not telling maintainers: "merging this PR will result in the following PRs being no longer mergeable". Most of the times the list would be empty, making the merging of small PRs a lot more a non brainer.
Note that it was rejected because I sent it into the wrong branch (we do use master these days) and so I even had to resubmit it https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/4308
I'm about to send in my 972nd PR now. The Rust book is 520 pages; that was the second version, the first of which was ~300 pages. Quite a big difference from +34/-2. I'm at +142,087/-166,524 lines to the main repo now, and #12 overall contributor.
Yes, not everyone who sends in a small patch will become a core contributor. But some will. It's a numbers game.