10 Tips for Better Pull Requests

[ketmar via Digitalmars-d]

On Fri, 16 Jan 2015 11:23:02 -0800
Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:

> On 1/16/2015 9:49 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> > I'm thinking of something like: if there's $(legitimate) request for changes but
> > the author is dormant for more than $(X) days, then close.
> 
> That's also a hamfisted policy. I've seen PR's that were good, but needed a bit 
> of work, but the author disappeared. Sometimes, I've taken those over and 
> finished them.
> 
> Arbitrarily closing them means they get lost forever.
that's why there will ALWAYS be alot of items in queue and it will not
be processed at any sane rate. add ten more people to process the PR
queue, and... there will be just more and more unprocessed PRs.

it's cause you're looking at that queue like it's a backpack full of
things that can lay there forever. sometimes somebody can pull some
thing out of backpack and work on it. but backpack will accumulate more
and more things over the time.

this will continue unless you realise that PR queue is not a backpack
full of possible cool things. it's a queue of things that *must* *be*
*processed* *within* *short* *time*. if it took more than ten days to
simply react on the thing -- throw it out, it just cluttering the queue.

this is one of the things that "github culture" gets very-very wrong. a
proper place to accumulate requests and code is bugzilla. and PR queue
is a queue for things that finally moved to "merging stage". i.e. for
things that must be reviewed and merged (or rejected) ASAP.

it doesn't matter how hard somebody will try to keep that queue
"manageable", it will be oveflown with requests. the only way to manage
it is to turn it from backpack to "ASAP-queue". so i repeat my point: if
something sits there for twenty days (let's add ten days) without any
motion -- remove it from the queue. either this, or it always be
cluttered.
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