I’m far from an expert on managing testing for a big project like this, so I could be mistaking the purpose of things. But isn’t that sort of the purpose of having the master branch, and then also having automated snapshots for people that want to test the most up-to-date stuff easily?
I remember this topic about that recently:
Are these snapshots still being deployed? And if so, is that possibly a good solution to get people testing new things like this faster and easier?
As it stands, I don’t see how using a 3rd party library would be any faster than me just going to the fork that the author’s PR is based on right now, downloading the code, and building it. That’s just as easy as using a 3rd party library for me. The only difference is that I’d have to include the built jar instead of referencing a dependency link in my gradle script, but that’s a very minor inconvenience.
Also, as someone who struggled very much with my first 3rd party library I posted to jfrog for pbrTerrains (which eventually got merged to core and also got almost no use before that), I think it is fair for an author of a big PR to just say no to having to do all of that if the feature is as important as a new rendering system, and if it does slow things down, then I guess its better to get there slow than never.