Improve contributor experience and PR backlog

[Seb via Digitalmars-d]

Hey all,

I came by a couple of old PRs lately and while it's amusing that 
people like @JackStouffer celebrate their PR anniversaries, it's 
a bit sad for such an amazing project. By looking at those old 
PRs there is a common pattern - someone had a great idea for a 
feature, idea or fix and wants to get it merged. However after 
one or two week they usually move on and a lot of pinging on both 
sides is required.
In any case I think you already know this. Let me cite from the 
DLang progress report from H2 2015 [2].

> We fell short of our 2000 pull requests goal in H2 2015. We 
> have had only 1378 pull requests. This is a 10% decline 
> year-over-year compared to the same period in 2014. We 
> attribute this to the long time of reviewing many pull 
> requests, which works against a good contributor experience.

I do know that the time of reviewers is limited and voluntary, 
but I recently read a nice article [3] about Node's contribution 
policy. It is similar to your current policy:

> For non-trivial contributions, pull requests should sit for at 
> least 36 hours to ensure that contributors in other timezones 
> have time to review. Consideration should also be given to 
> weekends and other holiday periods to ensure active committers 
> all have reasonable time to become involved in the discussion 
> and review process if they wish.

However note the key difference:

> Rather than the default mode for a change to be rejected until 
> enough people sign off, we make the default for every change to 
> land. This puts the onus on reviewers to note exactly what 
> adjustments need to be made in order for it to land [4].

I really do like this idea. It could work if the review window is 
increased to maybe one week and everything without a "needs 
changes" tag (or "needs consensus" for major changes) is fine to 
merge then.

Before you start to protest - this is just an idea.

[1] https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos/pull/3765
[2] http://wiki.dlang.org/Vision/2016H1
[3] 
https://medium.com/the-javascript-collection/healthy-open-source-967fa8be7951
[4] 
https://medium.com/the-javascript-collection/healthy-open-source-967fa8be7951#.loqfk3zf4