On Tue, Sep 26, 2017 at 7:40 PM, Nick Couchman <[email protected]> wrote:
> There are a couple of pull requests that have stalled with no response from > the original author. Okay, I have one myself that I need to go back and > finish up, but I'm more concerned about a couple of them that fix bugs or > other undesirable behavior. > > Before I go over the individual issues, Mike, I'm curious how you managed > to get client PR 174 to close when the merge was completed for PR 193 - > it's almost as if the reference in GitHub triggered the close > automatically? Is there anything special you had to do? This could be > useful if we're going to try to merge in some of the stalled PRs and get > them to close without involving the ASF Infra team and asking them > specifically to close them. > > To magically close #174, I included "closes #174" in my commit message. GitHub will then automatically close the pull request noted once that commit message is merged to master. Unless we're doing changes elsewhere which remove the need for the original PRs, we won't be able to do this. There is some hope on the horizon that we will be able to manage PRs directly in the future due to the ASF's deployment of GitBox: https://gitbox.apache.org/ >From what I've read in recent threads on the Incubator general@ list, GitBox will allow us to merge/close/etc. PRs like you'd normally expect. My understanding is that this is a limited deployment at the moment, but either I'm wrong about that and we can use it now, or we should be able to use it in the near future. Anyway, here are the ones that I think should be pushed through and where > the original authors seem to be unresponsive... > > https://github.com/apache/incubator-guacamole-client/pull/129 - > GUACAMOLE-243, related to LDAP referrals. I'm afraid I may be at least > partially responsible for not encouraging alt36 to be more involved, but > I've pinged on it several times and gotten no response. At least alt36's > changes, plus some additional changes to make referrals configurable, would > be really good to have the LDAP authentication code. > > https://github.com/apache/incubator-guacamole-client/pull/175 - > GUACAMOLE-350, allowing SSH keys beyond 2048 bits. The SSH keys I > routinely use are at least 4096, so this change is near and dear to my > day-to-day usage. Alexandre got this one almost to completion and seems to > have dropped it or run out of time. > > There are a couple of others that probably just need to be closed by Infra, > but those two I think would benefit the code to have the PRs finished up > and merged in. Any discussion about how we want to handle these? I know > we need to maintain credit and encourage participation, etc., but at some > point does it make sense to take what has been started and push it through > with the changes that are needed to get it to a merge-able place? > > For contributions from the community which have been reviewed, received feedback, and then fallen silent, we end up in an odd position. People get busy, people go on vacation, and some of these things take time (even if apparently simple), so it's always possible that the contributor will appear, take care of the feedback, and all is well. If that really seems to not be happening ... ... the obvious option would be for us to take over the contribution ourselves (assuming the feedback on the change deals with fixable problems with the code itself and not with whether the change is even necessary/desired at all). I don't relish that idea, since as you've noted, taking such action would reduce community participation. Contributors should grow into a pattern of continual, beneficial contributions, eventually graduating into committership. Stepping in and taking over a change defeats that. Setting aside PRs which are moving slowly for known reasons (being exceptionally large/unfamiliar, etc.), I think we should take all good faith action that we can to engage or re-engage the original contributor to continue working with us to bring their contribution upstream. If pings on GitHub aren't working, then we clearly need to try something else. I'd suggest reaching out privately via email to find out what's up, and if there's anything we can do to help move things along. Once they are engaged, things are healthy, even if it still takes a while for the PR to get through. If even that doesn't work, and the contributor seems to have truly fallen off the planet, then we can either take things over or reject the change. - Mike
