Hi Spark Developers,
I have a fundamental question on the process of contributing to Apache
Spark from outside the circle of committers.
I have gone through a number of pull requests and I always found it hard
to get feedback, especially from committers. I understand there is a
very high competition for getting attention of those few committers.
Given Spark's code base is so huge, only very few people will feel
comfortable approving code changes for a specific code section. Still,
the motivation of those that want to contribute suffers from this.
In particular I am getting annoyed by the auto-closing PR feature on
GitHub. I understand the usefulness of this feature for such a frequent
project, but I personally am impacted by the weaknesses of this
approach. I hope, this can be improved.
The feature first warns in advance that it is "... closing this PR
because it hasn't been updated in a while". This comment looks a bit
silly in situations where the contributor is waiting for committers'
feedback.
*What is the approved way to ...*
*... prevent it from being auto-closed?* Committing and commenting to
the PR does not prevent it from being closed the next day.
*...**re-open it? *The comment says "If you'd like to revive this PR,
please reopen it ...", but there is no re-open button anywhere on the PR!
*... remove the Stale tag?* The comment says "... ask a committer to
remove the Stale tag!". Where can I find a list of committers and their
contact details? What is the best way to contact them? E-Mail?
Mentioning them in a PR comment?
*... find the right committer to review a PR?* The contributors page
states "ping likely reviewers", but it does not state how to identify
likely reviewers. Do you recommend git-blaming the relevant code
section? What if those committers are not available any more? Whom to
ask next?
*... contact committers to get their attention?* Cc'ing them in PR
comments? Sending E-Mails? Doesn't that contribute to their cognitive load?
What is the expected contributor's response to a PR that does not get
feedback? Giving up?
Are there processes in place to increase the probability PRs do not get
forgotten, auto-closed and lost?
This is not about my specific pull requests or reviewers of those. I
appreciate their time and engagement.
This is about the general process of getting feedback and needed
improvements for it in order to increase contributor community happiness.
Cheers,
Enrico
