Hi, folks, I’ve been digging into the open PR queue over the past couple of days. To be blunt, 1100 open PRs is hugely intimidating to someone trying to figure out where to get started, and it’s also a “broken window” that makes a beginner think that their contributions are likely to be overlooked. I’m trying to figure out some practical ways that I can help address this.
I see that there was a discussion - https://lists.apache.org/thread/6g3n4wo3b3tpq2qxyyth3y8m9z4mcj8p - way back in July 2021, about what to do with stale PRs (there were 400 at the time), and I think the consensus then was that auto-closing abandoned PRs was a very unfriendly thing to do. I have some sympathy with that position. But, I don’t see any concrete followups on that in the years since. I wonder if I can take a case study and ask what I can practically do in this situation, and then possibly generalize to other cases, so that I can help chip away at this. Looking at https://github.com/apache/hadoop/pull/63 it’s a trivial PR to address a typo. There’s some responses requesting improvements, but ultimately the PR is abandoned. Meanwhile, the problem got solved elsewhere, so the PR is no longer relevant. In that specific case, is there a comment, tag, whatever, that I can add to that PR to indicate “this PR has been verified to no longer be relevant, please close”? I obviously cannot close it myself, since I rightfully lack the necessary karma to do so. This is just called out as an example. I have 84 other PRs that fall into that specific category (ie, a typo fix that was ultimately abandoned with no action) that I’d like to help with. I’m not looking to create work for someone else, but looking for how I can help, and also document that process for others to help work down the backlog. As an aside, I would note that the comments from hadoop-yetus are both hugely informative, and also seriously unhelpful when they are repeated multiple times, but it’s possible (likely?) that this has been addressed in the 10 years since then. I’m still working on the most ancient of the open PRs. Thanks! —Rich Stats, for those who enjoy stats: • **Total Open PRs:** 1,167 • **PRs abandoned for 2+ years:** 684 (58.6% of all open PRs) • **PRs abandoned for 3+ years:** 477 (40.9% of all open PRs) • **PRs abandoned for 5+ years:** 128 (11.0% of all open PRs) (“Abandoned” is defined as no comment/update of any kind in that period.)
