I have the same opinion as Joris. We shouldn't auto-close PRs simply
because they have not been recently updated. For a casual contributor it
can be extremely frustrating and demotivating to be dealt such a
treatment, especially if you've already found it difficult to attract
the attention of reviewers.
I also agree with Weston that some automated ping based on the PR status
could be more useful (and less hostile to contributors).
Regards
Antoine.
Le 31/03/2023 à 18:54, Weston Pace a écrit :
I just now caught up to the recent wave of closed PRs in my notifications
so maybe I see where some of this discussion is coming from :)
I agree with everything David said and will change my stance from neutral
to -0.5. My main problem is that I see no advantage to closing these PRs.
On Fri, Mar 31, 2023 at 9:51 AM David Li <lidav...@apache.org> wrote:
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.
