[Dlang-internal] The Phantom Zone

[Martin Nowak]

On Tuesday, 16 January 2018 at 20:04:35 UTC, Sebastian Wilzbach 
wrote:
>
>
> On 2018-01-16 19:32, qznc via Dlang-internal wrote:
>> On Monday, 15 January 2018 at 01:10:58 UTC, Walter Bright 
>> wrote:
>>> PRs banished to the Phantom Zone would have to have an 
>>> explanatory comment saying why.
>> 
>> I would suggest an alternative approach: Automate it.
>> 
>> 1. When there is no activity on a PR for one month, the bot 
>> pings the
>> author and asks for the status.
>> 2. When there is no activity on a PR for four months, the bot 
>> pings
>> three random other people and asks them to adopt the PR. Maybe 
>> it can
>> be more clever then "random" and look at what files are 
>> touched or
>> something.
>
> The bot currently marks a PR has stalled if there hasn't been 
> any activity within three months
>
>> 3. When there is no activity on a PR for half a year, the bot 
>> leaves a
>> short comment "no activity for half a year." and closes the PR.
>
> This would be trivial to implement, but I haven't done this so 
> far, because there hasn't been a consensus on this.
>
>> If someone wants to keep a PR alive it only takes single 
>> comment every
>> six months.
>> 
>> I doubt that there is any PR which got zero activity for six 
>> months,
>> yet was successfully merged later.
>
> Hehe, it does happen sometimes, e.g.
>
> https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/4988
>
> Also Rainers recently rebased #2480:
>
> https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/2480
>
> But obviously not too often.

It actually quite common 
(https://github.com/dlang-bots/dlang-bot/pull/109 ;)).
Someone has a good and jumps to work on it, then gets distracted, 
becomes busy with sth. else, or the problem turned out much more 
complicated. Now the initial motivation is gone and the PR gets 
abandoned.
But a year or so later the topic comes up again and the PR is 
revived.

See dub watch for example, it's almost 3 years old 
https://github.com/dlang/dub/pull/446.
The initial design was wrong, but the PR still contains lots of 
useful information and code.
It could also help someone else to pick up the task.
Sure we could just close it, but it feels like abandoning that 
idea altogether.