I agree, if the original author is not responding it seems totally fine to me for someone else to finish up a PR. If the new PR is based on the previous effort, I think we should be careful to always preserve authorship information. The easiest way is probably to keep the original commits. Ideally inactive PRs that we want to keep are rare enough that we can live with keeping the original commits without making the commit log too noisy.
Amateur license parsing, so buyer beware: The way I understand "You represent that each of Your Contributions is Your original creation" from the ICLA (https://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.pdf) is that it's probably not okay to take someone else's commits along with your own, squash them and submit the whole thing under your own name. Point 7 mentions how to submit on behalf of others. The first comment here may also be relevant regarding license for an unmerged PR https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-156 2017-09-14 16:03 GMT+02:00 Bobby Evans <ev...@oath.com.invalid>: > I totally agree. If you have reached out to an author and there has been > no response for either a bug fix or a feature that you want, then feel free > to take it over. Just be polite about it and make sure it is clear to > everyone what you are doing. > > - > Bobby > > On Wed, Sep 13, 2017 at 11:19 PM Jungtaek Lim <kabh...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Hi devs, > > > > I have seen some old pull requests for bugfix and new feature going to be > > stale. Some of us tried to ping to author several times but not respond > in > > some months. For new feature we may have to wait for authors, but for > > bugfix waiting authors means we are aware of the bug but we don't fix the > > bug because of credit which doesn't make sense to me if we should wait > for > > months. > > > > So IMHO at least we may want to handle inactive bugfix pull requests not > > too late, Maybe creating new PR addressing same thing without retaining > > commits, or taking over PR via retaining commits. If possible it may be > > ideal to take over inactive but valuable pull requests with retaining > > commits. > > > > What do you think about it? And does some of us know about any issues > > including license, authorship, or so if someone takes over inactive pull > > request with retaining their credit (commits)? > > > > Thanks, > > Jungtaek Lim (HeartSaVioR) > > >
