[Dlang-internal] The Phantom Zone

[Brad Roberts]

On 1/16/2018 2:22 PM, Walter Bright via Dlang-internal wrote:
> On 1/16/2018 12:35 PM, Brad Roberts wrote:
>> What's your goal with the PZ?
> 
> The current system is a binary "it's good enough to merge now" and "it 
> has zero merit whatsoever and should never be looked at again."

What?  It's far from binary today.  I don't understand this assertion at 
all.  Particularly since you directly counter it immediately.  Did you 
mean something closer to:  The current system has two extremes... ?  If 
so, then I don't agree with the starting point of "good enough" either.

> There's a continuum in between those poles, and that is what the PZ is 
> for. I listed 4 reasons a PR may fall in that continuum.

The PZ formalizes an option which effectively adds to the set of paths a 
PR can take.  The issue is that if it just becomes a new place to house 
roughly the same set of pull request then all that's been accomplished 
is hiding the problem a layer deeper and pissing off submitters even 
more.  Now, not only is their hard work not being looked at, it's 
actively (be it by a human or automation) been pushed even further into 
the shadows.

For what it's worth, I'm not trying to say that there's NO pulls for 
which closing is the right answer, clearly some need to be.  I'm also 
not saying that for some of that set that there's enough value in the 
pull requests that making sure it's easy to look back isn't a good idea. 
  What I'm trying to say is that those should be extremely rare.  Rare 
enough that they don't make up a meaningful percentage of the current queue.

>> Is it to have the github pull queues kept to a tiny number of open and 
>> active requests?
> 
> One is to keep the autotester from wasting resources on those.

No resources are wasted in the auto-tester due to old requests.  Stale 
requests are further down in the queue.  Time spent on them is time that 
if it wasn't building those it would sit idle.

> The other is the political/marketing issue of "what are those old PRs 
> doing there? They should just be merged or closed!"

Much like the size of the bugzilla db, from a basic PR standpoint, I 
don't care all that much.  I care a whole lot more about the effect to 
the author of a PR who's work has not progressed.  The end results might 
be the same, but the motivation is very different.

That said, I'm not an active developer and my opinion shouldn't be 
weighed all that heavily here.  Go ahead, try it.  I suspect you're not 
going to be satisfied with the results.