I think I'm -0.5 overall. I do think it is worthwhile giving a "final chance" ping to very stale PRs as has been suggested, and pinging reviewers for PRs that have been sitting around.
Automatically closing PRs purely based on time (since last update) is quite unfriendly. If the problem is reviewer/committer availability, this is mostly just sweeping it under the rug. (Especially for subprojects or areas of the project where there are just not many active reviewers; both Parquet-C++ and Java are facing this IMO.) Plus, it is not necessarily clear what the etiquette is around pinging reviewers. I can understand if a contributor does not necessarily want to bother reviewers even if they aren't getting immediate attention, hence having a bot do it may help. And we have only just started to roll out relevant changes like the 'awaiting review' label and use of CODEOWNERS to assign reviewers. I'm also concerned that there was an out-of-the-blue mass closure of PRs recently that didn't appear to even use the 30 day criteria, and which led to contributor questions/confusion. (Not to mention, arguably exacerbating the inbox problem for many reviewers.) On Fri, Mar 31, 2023, at 12:35, Gang Wu wrote: > From a contributor perspective, it would be great if a bot could detect a > PR is waiting > for review for a certain period of time and then automatically notify > reviewers if possible. > > > > On Sat, Apr 1, 2023 at 12:21 AM Joris Van den Bossche < > jorisvandenboss...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> On Fri, 31 Mar 2023 at 17:38, Alessandro Molina >> <alessan...@voltrondata.com.invalid> wrote: >> > >> > .. >> > My question probably would be... If a PR was sitting ignored for 30 days >> > without anyone from the community feeling the need to review and merge it >> > and without its primary author feeling the need to push for getting it >> > merged. Isn't that a signal that both parts consider that PR not >> important? >> >> I personally don't think that is necessarily the case, no. It might >> often be, but certainly not always. This is an open source community, >> including volunteer contributors. I think it's very normal that PRs >> can sometimes take a longer time to get updated. Also, from my side as >> a reviewer. There are more PRs (that interest me) than I personally >> have the capacity to review, so the fact that I didn't respond to a PR >> is not necessarily a signal that I think it's not a relevant PR for >> the project. >> >> And to be clear, this is for sure not an ideal situation. A too >> limited maintainers' reviewing capacity and slow response time is a >> problem. Having such stale PRs just sit there is a problem, both for >> the project as giving a bad contributor experience (I think stale PRs >> are often due to lack of review). But just closing them IMO isn't >> necessarily the best solution to that problem. >> >> Sometimes closing a PR might give a better contributor experience than >> letting the author wait in vain on reviews for years (if the reason is >> that there is no real interest in the PR), but I think such a decision >> about a contribution not being worth it should ideally still be a >> human decision. >>
