I am also +0 on this one. Having a PR closed without any reviews can be
discouraging for contributors, but at the same time, a PR requires more
changes to merge as it languishes.
On 23/08/2024 5:11 am, Julian Hyde wrote:
+0
I haven’t thought about the details, but it might improve our situation
regarding pull requests. It’s a small reversible step, so I would support
trying it. If it doesn’t help, we can change policy back again.
Julian
On Aug 22, 2024, at 10:59 AM, Ruben Q L <rube...@gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks for opening the discussion, Michael.
+1 on the idea.
On Thu, Aug 22, 2024 at 6:43 PM Michael Mior <mm...@apache.org> wrote:
Hi all,
I know the better solution here is to have more people reviewing and
merging PRs to keep momentum going. However, even when someone is engaged
in trying to help merge a PR, sometimes the original author will disappear
or changes become irrelevant over time. I think having a smaller number of
open PRs can help keep things more manageable. The goal is that regardless
of when the PR was opened, it should be kept open if there is still
interest. But PRs which have been abandoned should be closed.
I'm suggesting implementing (via GitHub Actions, e.g.
https://github.com/actions/stale) a process that will automatically close
PRs after some period of inactivity. This doesn't mean we lose any of the
work. We can also have PRs automatically be reopened if there are any
future comments. The idea would be that after X number of days, a comment
is automatically posted and a label of "stale" is applied. Then after Y
more days, the PR would be automatically closed. Any activity (more commits
on the branch or comments) will remove the stale label and reset the clock.
I'd propose implementing this with X=30 and Y=90. This gives four months
for any activity to keep a PR alive. Again, if it is closed, no work is
lost. But I think four months of no activity is a strong indicator that
nothing is likely to move forward in the near future. I will note that if
this policy were already in place, it would mean ~85% of our current open
PRs would have been closed (if there was no intervention after the initial
ping).
Here's some configuration data from a few projects which have implemented
this
Apache Age, X=60, Y=14
Apache Airflow, X=45, Y=5
Apache Beam, X=60, Y=7
Apache ECharts, X=730,Y=7
Apache Iceberg, X=30, Y=7
Apache Kafka, X=90, Y=-1 (never automatically close)
Apache Solr, X=60, Y=-1
Apache Spark, X=100,Y=0
Apache Superset, X=60, Y=7
--
Michael Mior
mm...@apache.org
