10 Tips for Better Pull Requests

[Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d]

On 1/16/2015 12:48 PM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> On Friday, 16 January 2015 at 19:23:06 UTC, Walter Bright 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.
>
> Add an "abandoned" label, and assign it when closing? Then they won't get lost,
> but also won't clutter the list.

What should happen is the list of PRs should be sorted on a basis of 
most-recently-touched-is-first. The older PRs then naturally fade to the 'next' 
pages. 'clutter' is not a problem, unless we decide that number of open PRs is a 
proxy for quality of the project.

We should be very careful about working metrics like "number of open PRs". Focus 
on such can generate an illusion of progress, and actually make things worse.

I've worked at companies that would rate engineers based on the "bug count". 
That ended very badly, it was so bad it was comical, how working that number 
actually wrecked the quality of the product. I've seen similar disasters with 
use of metrics on inventory minimization, and others. Ever since it has made me 
deeply suspicious about basing quality on such numbers.