Hi,
Do you know if the bot can send a first "warn" comment before closing
the PR ?
I think that would be great: if the contributor is not active after the
warn message, then, it's fine to close the PR (the contributor can
always open a new one later if it makes sense).
Regards
JB
On 14/05/2018 16:20, Kenneth Knowles wrote:
Hi all,
Spotted this thread on [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>. I didn't make a combined thread because
each project should discuss on our own.
I think it would be great to share "stale PR closer bot" infrastructure
(and this might naturally be a hook where we put other things / combine
with merge-bot / etc).
The downside to automation is being less empathetic - but hopefully for
very stale PRs no one is really listening anyhow.
Kenn
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Ufuk Celebi <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
Date: Mon, May 14, 2018 at 5:58 AM
Subject: Re: Closing (automatically?) inactive pull requests
To: <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
Hey Piotr,
thanks for bringing this up. I really like this proposal and also saw
it work successfully at other projects. So +1 from my side.
- I like the approach with a notification one week before
automatically closing the PR
- I think a bot will the best option as these kinds of things are
usually followed enthusiastically in the beginning but eventually
loose traction
We can enable better integration with GitHub by using ASF GitBox
(https://gitbox.apache.org/setup/) but we should discuss that in a
separate thread.
– Ufuk
On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 12:04 PM, Piotr Nowojski
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> Hey,
>
> We have lots of open pull requests and quite some of them are
stale/abandoned/inactive. Often such old PRs are impossible to merge due
to conflicts and it’s easier to just abandon and rewrite them.
Especially there are some PRs which original contributor created long
time ago, someone else wrote some comments/review and… that’s about it.
Original contributor never shown up again to respond to the comments.
Regardless of the reason such PRs are clogging the GitHub, making it
difficult to keep track of things and making it almost impossible to
find a little bit old (for example 3+ months) PRs that are still valid
and waiting for reviews. To do something like that, one would have to
dig through tens or hundreds of abandoned PRs.
>
> What I would like to propose is to agree on some inactivity dead
line, lets say 3 months. After crossing such deadline, PRs should be
marked/commented as “stale”, with information like:
>
> “This pull request has been marked as stale due to 3 months of
inactivity. It will be closed in 1 week if no further activity occurs.
If you think that’s incorrect or this pull request requires a review,
please simply write any comment.”
>
> Either we could just agree on such policy and enforce it manually
(maybe with some simple tooling, like a simple script to list inactive
PRs - seems like couple of lines in python by using PyGithub) or we
could think about automating this action. There are some bots that do
exactly this (like this one: https://github.com/probot/stale
<https://github.com/probot/stale> ), but probably they would need to be
adopted to limitations of our Apache repository (we can not add labels
and we can not close the PRs via GitHub).
>
> What do you think about it?
>
> Piotrek
