I just now caught up to the recent wave of closed PRs in my notifications so maybe I see where some of this discussion is coming from :)
I agree with everything David said and will change my stance from neutral to -0.5. My main problem is that I see no advantage to closing these PRs. On Fri, Mar 31, 2023 at 9:51 AM David Li <lidav...@apache.org> wrote: > I think I'm -0.5 overall. I do think it is worthwhile giving a "final > chance" ping to very stale PRs as has been suggested, and pinging reviewers > for PRs that have been sitting around. > > Automatically closing PRs purely based on time (since last update) is > quite unfriendly. If the problem is reviewer/committer availability, this > is mostly just sweeping it under the rug. (Especially for subprojects or > areas of the project where there are just not many active reviewers; both > Parquet-C++ and Java are facing this IMO.) Plus, it is not necessarily > clear what the etiquette is around pinging reviewers. I can understand if a > contributor does not necessarily want to bother reviewers even if they > aren't getting immediate attention, hence having a bot do it may help. And > we have only just started to roll out relevant changes like the 'awaiting > review' label and use of CODEOWNERS to assign reviewers. > > I'm also concerned that there was an out-of-the-blue mass closure of PRs > recently that didn't appear to even use the 30 day criteria, and which led > to contributor questions/confusion. (Not to mention, arguably exacerbating > the inbox problem for many reviewers.) > > On Fri, Mar 31, 2023, at 12:35, Gang Wu wrote: > > From a contributor perspective, it would be great if a bot could detect a > > PR is waiting > > for review for a certain period of time and then automatically notify > > reviewers if possible. > > > > > > > > On Sat, Apr 1, 2023 at 12:21 AM Joris Van den Bossche < > > jorisvandenboss...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > >> On Fri, 31 Mar 2023 at 17:38, Alessandro Molina > >> <alessan...@voltrondata.com.invalid> wrote: > >> > > >> > .. > >> > My question probably would be... If a PR was sitting ignored for 30 > days > >> > without anyone from the community feeling the need to review and > merge it > >> > and without its primary author feeling the need to push for getting it > >> > merged. Isn't that a signal that both parts consider that PR not > >> important? > >> > >> I personally don't think that is necessarily the case, no. It might > >> often be, but certainly not always. This is an open source community, > >> including volunteer contributors. I think it's very normal that PRs > >> can sometimes take a longer time to get updated. Also, from my side as > >> a reviewer. There are more PRs (that interest me) than I personally > >> have the capacity to review, so the fact that I didn't respond to a PR > >> is not necessarily a signal that I think it's not a relevant PR for > >> the project. > >> > >> And to be clear, this is for sure not an ideal situation. A too > >> limited maintainers' reviewing capacity and slow response time is a > >> problem. Having such stale PRs just sit there is a problem, both for > >> the project as giving a bad contributor experience (I think stale PRs > >> are often due to lack of review). But just closing them IMO isn't > >> necessarily the best solution to that problem. > >> > >> Sometimes closing a PR might give a better contributor experience than > >> letting the author wait in vain on reviews for years (if the reason is > >> that there is no real interest in the PR), but I think such a decision > >> about a contribution not being worth it should ideally still be a > >> human decision. > >> >
