On Wed, Sep 27, 2017 at 5:42 AM, Nick Couchman <[email protected]> wrote:
> ... > > Is it worth setting some sort of expectation (policy sounds too formal) > about how long these PRs are allowed to languish, how many attempts we make > to revive, them, etc., before someone else is allowed/encouraged to grab > the code and drive it to completion? > IMHO, no. Not everything needs to be codified, and I can see such a policy inhibiting the spirit of collaboration that's vital to projects under the ASF in general. It's clear that we as a community are capable of recognizing when a PR is having trouble, even without black-and-white rules defining this. > ... > For the two PRs I mentioned above, I'm happy to take a stab at trying to > contact those people directly, see if I can locate those e-mail addresses > and get a response from them. If you fetch the changes into your local clone of the repository, or view the patch form of the changes, there should be an email address associated with each commit. I guess the remaining questions in my mind are: > - What is the threshold for "fallen off the planet?" At some point, in > order to move the code along, (I think) we need to draw a line in the sand > and say we're going to merge/fork/modify/close the PR, and I think it would > be beneficial if contributors understood that going in. > As above, I don't think defining a threshold is necessary here, but the fact that we have to even ask the question "has this user fallen off the planet?" is probably evidence enough that either our communication is not reaching the contributor, or that something else is wrong. - What should we do if we get a response along the lines of "I'm no longer > interested," or "I don't have time," or "You're welcome to finish it for > me?" When reaching out to the contributor, we definitely shouldn't imply that we are looking into taking over the change, and probably shouldn't even consider such action in all but exceptional cases. I would say move forward under the assumption that we will not need to make that choice, and that the correct choice if necessary is "don't accept the changes". Assume the contributor is willing to work with the community to get things out the door, and go from there. - Mike
