Some Observations on the D Development Process

[Dmitry Olshansky]

On Thursday, 4 January 2018 at 18:09:32 UTC, Seb wrote:
> On Thursday, 4 January 2018 at 17:44:58 UTC, Jack Stouffer 
> wrote:
>> DMD also has at least 30 PRs which have had no action from the 
>> author in over a year. There's no reason these should be kept 
>> open; they just take up auto-tester resources and lower the 
>> signal to noise ratio.
>
> FYI: stalled PRs don't take up resources (except they target 
> stable, which is why one of the reasons stable PRs should be 
> merged ASAP). It's due to the auto-tester sorting PRs by their 
> activity.

They waste resources of folks looking to review stuff that is 
actual and active.

>
> BTW: For those who haven't seen this, dlang-bot now detects 
> these stalled PRs and for now labels them as "stalled":
>
> https://github.com/dlang-bots/dlang-bot/blob/master/source/dlangbot/cron.d#L60
>
> I'm not sure whether auto-closing them is a good idea, but we 
> definitely need to do sth. about them.
> Also one year without any activity is a very long time.

It’s not like we loose anything, we don’t delete code of the 
author. So should he/she find time - just create a new PR. Also 
these willing to dig in the closed PRs are free to do so (it’s 
just a couple of passes to add a filter to your search).

Personally, I’d say 3 of months of silence usually enough to put 
off most except for seasoned contributors. Many opensource 
projects do even worse job but we should look at the best 
examples.

> Dlang-bot currently uses 90 days though imho that's already 
> very conservative.

Just tagging doesn’t really help, I already can sort by activity.

>
> Example:
>
> https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pulls?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Apr+label%3Astalled