On Sat, 31 Jan 2026 at 22:37, '[email protected]' via sympy <[email protected]> wrote: > > As a minor contributor, I strongly agree with the idea that PRs without > activity for some period of time should be automatically closed. I am not > sure the core maintainers and reviewers need to be notified. The originator > of the PR should be notified with a message explaining that it was closed > because of inactivity over the last XX period of time. They should be > encouraged to review the PR carefully and decide if they have the time and > interest in adjusting the code so that it meets all requirements for merging > and address any concerns raised in the PR before it was closed. If so, they > should open a new pull request with code updated to pass all tests when built > with the current development branch and refer to the old PR in case reviewers > want to look at the history. > > I would be in favor of the period of inactivity being in the range of 6 > months to a year. This would potentially close both pull requests I currently > have open (https://github.com/sympy/sympy/pull/28258 and > https://github.com/sympy/sympy/pull/24574). This seems reasonable, because > although I would be interested in pursuing both of them, the reality is that > my primary job is as a Chemistry Professor/Computational Quantum Chemist and > I am unlikely to have much time for work on either of these until at least > the end of the current semester. I do not object to opening a new PR or > reopening the old one when I get back to being able to consider the code.
I'm not sure how this would work in practice but for example if someone else closes your PR then I think it isn't possible for you to reopen it unless you are a member (some who can merge PRs). You could of course comment that you would like to reopen and then a member could do it and we could make sure that the bot that closes the PR would leave a message explaining that. I'm not sure about 6 months. I think that basically after 1 month of inactivity the PR is usually forgotten but the amount of time passed is still small enough that the PR could easily be revived if people were reminded and actually wanted to continue with it. If all maintainers simply happened to overlook a PR then 1 month is probably a good amount of time for there to be some kind of notification so perhaps a bot could comment then that it has been inactive for 1 month and then if no one does anything then at the 2 month mark it can be closed. It would probably be helpful for some people if the 1 month bot message explains some common reasons to the author like "if CI checks have failed and there are red crosses everywhere then that might explain why no one has reviewed your PR". This is something that is more common right now in the AI age that someone has opened a PR with broken code and then all of the checks have failed but it almost seems like the author has not seen that all the tests have failed. I would not generally bother commenting to say something like "as you can see all the tests have failed" but perhaps after 1 month it might be good to point that out to the author. If we wait longer than 2 months then what are we actually waiting for? No one is actually going to go back more than 2 months looking for PRs to review. If anyone wants to revive it further in the future then it can just be reopened but if no one expresses any positive interest in doing that then what benefit do we get from keeping a 2 month old PR in the "open" state rather than the "closed" state? The closed PRs are still there with all their code and message for everyone to see. -- Oscar -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sympy/CAHVvXxRMeAcGSYm6mFrksyPCAd%2BPnV7VRTwxZzxiQs6hP7r%3DrQ%40mail.gmail.com.
