Re: Closing (automatically?) inactive pull requests

[Chesnay Schepler]

-1

For clarification (since the original mail indicates otherwise), the 
number of pull requests that this would affect is fairly small.
Only about 25-30% of all open PRs are blocked on the contributor, the 
remaining ones are actually blocked on the review.
Thus is reject the premise that one has to search through that many PRs 
to find something to review, there is plenty.

I believe it to be highly unfair for us to close PRs due to inactivity, 
when the primary cause has been /our /own inactivity.
If a PR is opened and the first comment comes in 3 months late, then I 
don't blame the contributor for not responding.
IMO we owe it to the contributor to evaluate their PR, and if necessary 
bring it to a merge-able state (to a certain extend).

There's also the fact that closing these PRs outright would waste a lot 
of good contributions.

Finally, this solution is overkill for what we want to achieve. If we 
want to make it easier to find PRs to review all we need is
GitBox integration and tagging or PRs. That's it. We could have a /fully 
/tagged PR list /tomorrow/, if we really wanted to.

On 15.05.2018 05:10, Ted Yu wrote:
bq. this pull request requires a review, please simply write any comment.

Shouldn't the wording of such comment be known before hand ?

Otherwise pull request waiting for committers' review may be mis-classified.

Cheers

On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 7:59 PM, blues zheng <kisim...@163.com> wrote:

+1 for the proposal.


Best,
blues
On 05/14/2018 20:58, Ufuk Celebi wrote:
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
<pi...@data-artisans.com> 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