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
