All good points. Tale a look at the PR. I think the current draft keeps the spirit and is hopefully more inviting by removing noise and inaccuracies.
Kenn On Mon, Oct 5, 2026 at 3:13 PM Jan Lukavský <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > I think the template is a little too much verbose, but otherwise it is > useful (agree, mostly for new contributors, but that is the point of it). I > would not go with replacing "PLEASE" with a text that should be more > unpleasant, because our interest should not be to create friction, but the > other way around - trying to invite people in. > > I'll leave it as is or we can shorten it, but I'd keep the spirit. > > Jan > On 9/29/26 21:07, Valentyn Tymofieiev via dev wrote: > > I noticed new contributors often mention their changes in CHANGES.md, a > hint they likely picked up from the template. Contributor tips seem useful > too, so I'd rather keep the template. We can clarify or shorten to only > keep what's useful. > > On my PRs I usually delete the template and write my own description. > > > I just reviewed yet another pull request that has the description > "PLEASE add a meaningful description here" from the template, just left > there. > > PRs should have a meaningful description unless the title explains > everything. I would encourage asking the author to add one or edit the > description before merge. > > We could also change the "PLEASE line" into smth like: > > <Replace this template with PR description unless self-explanatory from > title> to make it less unpleasant when people ignore it. > > On Tue, Sep 29, 2026 at 11:43 AM Jack McCluskey via dev < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> A lot of the boilerplate is largely for new contributors. Leaving or >> removing the boilerplate isn't going to make a difference to the regular >> contributors but could add some friction to new ones. That being said, >> it's pretty annoying as a code reviewer to get a pull request with a >> title and no other context. I'm not asking for the overwritten, fully >> formatted LLM PR summaries, but a quick explanation of what intent of the >> PR is would be helpful. It would be great if Beam contributors as a whole >> could be more consistent in that effort... I worry that ditching the >> template will further encourage the pattern of PRs only coming with titles. >> >> So my opinion is "leave it and try to be more active as a community in >> writing PR descriptions" without enforcing it via infrastructure. >> >> On Tue, Sep 29, 2026 at 2:25 PM Danny McCormick via dev < >> [email protected]> wrote: >> >>> I find the template useless for my own work, and I don't think it helps >>> me review changes from committers. But I do wonder if it is helpful for new >>> contributors (IMO this is who the feature is for). >>> >>> My (unsubstantiated) opinion is that: >>> >>> >>> 1. It is useless for most people, but also harmless >>> 2. It probably sometimes helps new contributors >>> >>> >>> Given that, I'd vote to leave it, but I don't care very much. >>> >>> Thanks, >>> Danny >>> >>> On Tue, Sep 29, 2026 at 2:06 PM Kenneth Knowles <[email protected]> wrote: >>> >>>> Hi all, >>>> >>>> For discussion: https://github.com/apache/beam/pull/40339 >>>> >>>> I just reviewed yet another pull request that has the description >>>> "PLEASE add a meaningful description here" from the template, just >>>> left there. >>>> >>>> >>>> - Since 2026-01-01 it looks like 370+ PRs have left the template >>>> without modifying it [unmodified]. >>>> - There are a total of about 1800 non-dependabot PRs in the same >>>> time. [total] >>>> - In fact, of the 1430 others, quite a few are just blank or just >>>> say "Fixes #<issue>" so I would round up to 25% "blank" descriptions. >>>> >>>> So my thoughts on this: >>>> >>>> - A rate of 75% of people actually describing their change is >>>> probably satisfied by the null hypothesis: this many people would do it >>>> without any template begging them to do it) >>>> - A fully blank PR field might even be *more* likely to be edited. >>>> - The other stuff in the template is really mostly noise, or should >>>> be automation. (like choosing a reviewer or the CI status badges) >>>> - A lot of PRs now have their description written by an LLM, or >>>> taken directly from the commit text (also written by LLM) so we don't >>>> need >>>> the template. >>>> - We could have an LLM check if they actually added a description >>>> and fail the check, (with a shortcut for totally unmodified description, >>>> or tiny edit distance, that uses zero tokens) >>>> >>>> WDYT? >>>> >>>> I'm just in a "cleaning up extra / old stuff" mood lately. >>>> >>>> Kenn >>>> >>>> [unmodified] >>>> https://github.com/apache/beam/pulls?q=is%3Apr+state%3Aclosed++created%3A%3E%3D2026-01-01+%22add+a+meaningful+description%22 >>>> >>>> [total] >>>> https://github.com/apache/beam/pulls?q=is%3Apr+state%3Aclosed++created%3A%3E%3D2026-01-01+-author%3Aapp%2Fdependabot >>>> >>>
