Hello,
On 6/17/20 12:33 AM, Justin Mclean wrote:
Sadly I think there is not much we can do for contributions >1 year - those
patches will be likely outdated already - and the contributor have probably
abandoned it.
Another point of view would be that the project has failed to either review,
merge or encourage the committer to continue to work on this project. Imagine
you make your first coupe of small contribution to a project and then some
point later you are told they are stale and won't be acted upon. Would you want
to make further contributions to that project? Is doing this welcoming to new
committers?
Unfortunately I've kinda encountered the same myself when I first tried to contribute to an opensource project - that's why I think we've already failed our new
contributors in the past by not taking care of those PRs - I think by employing the bot and cleaning up years of stale PRs; we will get to a point when in case new
contributors are not getting attention - they can at least get a message in a reasonable timeframe that they should drop a mail to the dev list to drive attention to a
specific PR.
Moving to a PR based world also enables to get a better picture of what PRs are active/etc...and also having a higher chance to get green QA runs may also help us look
better as a project to contribute-to.
I think we should look forward and try not to repeat the same mistake again. It would be great if more time would be spent on reviewing changes; one thing I could think of
is that we could self-add ourself as reviewers to the PRs - it will be clear(er) which PRs are being reviewed and which are still without reviewer.
cheers,
Zoltan
