I totally agree with Chesnay here. A bot just treats the symptoms but
not the cause.
Maybe this needs no immediate action but we as committers should aim for
a more honest communication. A lot of PRs have a reason for being stale
but instead of communicating this reason we just don't touch them.
But let's introduce a bot and see how it will affect the situation.
Regards,
Timo
Am 14.01.19 um 15:19 schrieb Chesnay Schepler:
For reference, I'm still very much -1 on this.
The short version is that auto-closing PRs hides symptoms that lead to
stale PRs in the first place.
As an example, consider flink-ml. We have a fair amount of open PRs
targeted at this feature, that naturally this bot would close.
What are they stale? Because at the time no committer was interested
in them. Why are they still around? Because, despite seeing virtually
no development for over 2(!!!) years, we still haven't officially
declared flink-ml as dead. There is no note in the docs discouraging
contributors from working on it, all the JIRAs still exist, and
naturally the PRs were not closed because "maybe someone will look at
the soon.".
We have this issue also in other areas, like gelly, storm, python,
streaming-python. WebUI PRs also routinely become stale. Is anyone
asking why or how we could prevent that? Hell no. But sweeping it
under a rug? /Sign me up/.
Committers should proactively close PRs that will not be merged so
that we can properly communicate to the contributor why this happened,
reflect this decision in JIRA and possibly update the contribution
guide as a means of preventing such PRs from being opened again. This
also provides committers with a reference based on which they can
close future PRs.
Recommending contributors to continuously update their PRs to prevent
them from being closed automatically is a terrible idea. This should
only be recommended if a committer has actually taken interest in the
PR and would be willing to review an updated version.
Anything else completely disrespects the contributor's time, on the
off-chance that they actually do so.
On 14.01.2019 09:34, Aljoscha Krettek wrote:
I think the automatic closing is an integral part, without it we
would never close those stale PRs that we have lying around from 2015
and 2016.
I would suggest to set the staleness interval quite high, say 2
months. Thus initially the bot would mainly close very old PRs and we
shouldn’t even notice it on day-to-day PRs.
It seems there is a larger consensus for adding the PR bot. By the
way, keep in mind that we can always disable the bot again if we
don’t like it.
On 14. Jan 2019, at 03:33, Kurt Young <ykt...@gmail.com> wrote:
+1 to the bot, but -1 to the automatically closing PR behavior.
Can we just use the bolt to detect and tag the PR with stale flag
and leave
the decision whether to close the PR to the author?
Best,
Kurt
On Sun, Jan 13, 2019 at 11:49 PM Kostas Kloudas
<k.klou...@da-platform.com>
wrote:
+1 to try the bot.
It may, at first, seem less empathetic than a solution that involves a
human monitoring the PRs,
but, in essence, having a PR stale for months (or even years) is at
least
as discouraging for a
new contributor.
Labels could further reduce the problem of noise, but I think that
this
"noise" is a necessary evil
during the "transition period" of moving from the current situation
to one
with cleaner PR backlog.
Cheers,
Kostas
On Sun, Jan 13, 2019 at 1:02 PM Dominik Wosiński <wos...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Hey,
I agree with Timo here that we should introduce labels that will
improve
communication for PRs. IMHO this will show what percentage of PRs is
really
stale and not just abandoned due to the misunderstanding or other
communication issues.
Best Regards,
Dom.
