3 months of waiting...

[Les De Ridder]

On Thursday, 6 February 2020 at 16:50:32 UTC, Steven 
Schveighoffer wrote:
> On 2/6/20 11:26 AM, berni44 wrote:
> [...]
> 
>> So I decided to stay away for a week to calm down and to have 
>> time to think about this. Finally I came to the conclusion, 
>> that I do not fit in this community. So I will leave.
>
> That's too bad, I think your advent of bug fixes was an awesome 
> initiative. One thing that is true about open source volunteer 
> work, it's mostly thankless, and generally there are not enough 
> people to work on it as it is. Sometimes good and productive 
> people find that incompatible with their requirements, but I 
> don't know how we could possibly fix that.

This is what's key here, imo. It can be very frustrating to have 
PRs or
even issues open for months or years. If you have more 
maintainers,
there's a higher probability at least one of them cares personally
about getting your issue or PR closed. But finding knowledgeable
maintainers is hard, because that's mostly a thankless job too. 
So I
don't think there's an easy fix either.

Something that might be valuable would be to actively encourage 
user
involvement by voting on issues and PRs. This gets us strength in
numbers and the social reward can be motivating for maintainers 
and
contributors. This will become easier once the issue tracker for 
the
core repos is moved over to GitHub[1].

Also, while the core issue here may not have an obvious solution, 
we
should make sure we don't worsen it by arbitrarily closing 
old/'stale'
issues or PRs. Some open-source projects have recently fallen 
into this
trap, e.g. by using a GitHub bot to automatically close old issues
and/or PRs, which is confusing for users and discouraging for
contributors.

[1] https://github.com/dlang/projects/issues/43