Re: Proposal: add a bot to close PRs that haven't been updated in 30 days

[Jacob Wujciak <ja...@voltrondata.com.INVALID>]

I am +1 on the general idea. Looking at other projects a two step process
with the PRs being marked stale first (with a comment to ping participants)
and only being closed after a second period of time.

I also agree with Rok that it would be nice to do /something/ with the
issue backlog. There are a lot of valid issues but also a bunch of
outdated/superseded ones that could be closed.

On Fri, Mar 31, 2023 at 9:59 PM Rok Mihevc <ro...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I agree with Joris' and David's points here and would prefer some form of
> pinging.
>
> Also at 120 open PRs we could realistically close out stale ones manually.
> Meanwhile we have 3.2k open issues where we might want to get creative.
>
> Rok
>
> On Fri, Mar 31, 2023 at 9:17 PM Antoine Pitrou <an...@python.org> wrote:
>
> >
> > I have the same opinion as Joris. We shouldn't auto-close PRs simply
> > because they have not been recently updated. For a casual contributor it
> > can be extremely frustrating and demotivating to be dealt such a
> > treatment, especially if you've already found it difficult to attract
> > the attention of reviewers.
> >
> > I also agree with Weston that some automated ping based on the PR status
> > could be more useful (and less hostile to contributors).
> >
> > Regards
> >
> > Antoine.
> >
> >
> > Le 31/03/2023 à 18:54, Weston Pace a écrit :
> > > I just now caught up to the recent wave of closed PRs in my
> notifications
> > > so maybe I see where some of this discussion is coming from :)
> > >
> > > I agree with everything David said and will change my stance from
> neutral
> > > to -0.5.  My main problem is that I see no advantage to closing these
> > PRs.
> > >
> > > On Fri, Mar 31, 2023 at 9:51 AM David Li <li...@apache.org> wrote:
> > >
> > >> I think I'm -0.5 overall. I do think it is worthwhile giving a "final
> > >> chance" ping to very stale PRs as has been suggested, and pinging
> > reviewers
> > >> for PRs that have been sitting around.
> > >>
> > >> Automatically closing PRs purely based on time (since last update) is
> > >> quite unfriendly. If the problem is reviewer/committer availability,
> > this
> > >> is mostly just sweeping it under the rug. (Especially for subprojects
> or
> > >> areas of the project where there are just not many active reviewers;
> > both
> > >> Parquet-C++ and Java are facing this IMO.) Plus, it is not necessarily
> > >> clear what the etiquette is around pinging reviewers. I can understand
> > if a
> > >> contributor does not necessarily want to bother reviewers even if they
> > >> aren't getting immediate attention, hence having a bot do it may help.
> > And
> > >> we have only just started to roll out relevant changes like the
> > 'awaiting
> > >> review' label and use of CODEOWNERS to assign reviewers.
> > >>
> > >> I'm also concerned that there was an out-of-the-blue mass closure of
> PRs
> > >> recently that didn't appear to even use the 30 day criteria, and which
> > led
> > >> to contributor questions/confusion. (Not to mention, arguably
> > exacerbating
> > >> the inbox problem for many reviewers.)
> > >>
> > >> On Fri, Mar 31, 2023, at 12:35, Gang Wu wrote:
> > >>>  From a contributor perspective, it would be great if a bot could
> > detect a
> > >>> PR is waiting
> > >>> for review for a certain period of time and then automatically notify
> > >>> reviewers if possible.
> > >>>
> > >>>
> > >>>
> > >>> On Sat, Apr 1, 2023 at 12:21 AM Joris Van den Bossche <
> > >>> jorisvandenbossche@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >>>
> > >>>> On Fri, 31 Mar 2023 at 17:38, Alessandro Molina
> > >>>> <al...@voltrondata.com.invalid> wrote:
> > >>>>>
> > >>>>> ..
> > >>>>> My question probably would be... If a PR was sitting ignored for 30
> > >> days
> > >>>>> without anyone from the community feeling the need to review and
> > >> merge it
> > >>>>> and without its primary author feeling the need to push for getting
> > it
> > >>>>> merged. Isn't that a signal that both parts consider that PR not
> > >>>> important?
> > >>>>
> > >>>> I personally don't think that is necessarily the case, no. It might
> > >>>> often be, but certainly not always. This is an open source
> community,
> > >>>> including volunteer contributors. I think it's very normal that PRs
> > >>>> can sometimes take a longer time to get updated. Also, from my side
> as
> > >>>> a reviewer. There are more PRs (that interest me) than I personally
> > >>>> have the capacity to review, so the fact that I didn't respond to a
> PR
> > >>>> is not necessarily a signal that I think it's not a relevant PR for
> > >>>> the project.
> > >>>>
> > >>>> And to be clear, this is for sure not an ideal situation. A too
> > >>>> limited maintainers' reviewing capacity and slow response time is a
> > >>>> problem. Having such stale PRs just sit there is a problem, both for
> > >>>> the project as giving a bad contributor experience (I think stale
> PRs
> > >>>> are often due to lack of review). But just closing them IMO isn't
> > >>>> necessarily the best solution to that problem.
> > >>>>
> > >>>> Sometimes closing a PR might give a better contributor experience
> than
> > >>>> letting the author wait in vain on reviews for years (if the reason
> is
> > >>>> that there is no real interest in the PR), but I think such a
> decision
> > >>>> about a contribution not being worth it should ideally still be a
> > >>>> human decision.
> > >>>>
> > >>
> > >
> >
>