[gentoo-project] Discontinuing the support for GitHub pull requests

[Michał Górny]

Hi, everyone.

TL;DR: if nobody comes up with a good solution and implements it, we'll
be discontinuing support for GitHub as contribution platform for Gentoo
and automatically closing all PRs except for those meant for proxy-
maint.


We've put a significant effort to make it convenient to use GitHub to
contribute to Gentoo. Many users have appreciated that, and so did many
developers. I think we can call that a success. However, I don't think
that's really successful enough.

The main goal for using GitHub was to make it easy both for users to
submit their contributions, and for Gentoo developers to review
and merge them. However, for that to work out we'd actually have to have
more Gentoo developers *care* and we don't have that.

We have maybe a dozen developers who are actually looking through their
own pull requests. Everything else is usually reviewed by the few active
proxy-maint team members who are simply overwhelmed with work. What's
even worse, they are regularly attacked by other developers which
doesn't really encourage further work.

The two major problems we have are:

1. Developers who refuse to review pull requests to their packages.
Yes, I can understand that some people have their reasons for not using
GitHub. However, I do not consider it appropriate if they refuse to use
GitHub to review pull requests for their Gentoo packages but at the same
time use it for their own toy projects and/or work.

In any case, those developers effectively mean that we either have to
close the contributions in the users' face or proxy them to maintainers.
The first solution harms contributors, the second adds a lot of work.

2. Developers who ignore GitHub mail for whatever reason, and expect us
to ping them on every contribution. We just don't have the resources to
track everyone who might or might not have gotten a notification, or
maybe he should be pinged twice, or maybe he doesn't want to use GitHub
except he added his account to Gentoo org for the fun of it...

In either case, the results are that pull requests stay open without any
reply for a long time, we spend a significant effort trying to get
someone to merge them, and when someone finally gets to them it turns
out they need to be updated... This doesn't really work for our users,
neither does it make things easier for us. If anything, it just means
some of us end up doing a lot of extra work for no final benefit.

Unless someone has a very good idea how to solve this, I will declare
pull requests for regular packages unsupported 7 days from now, that is
on 2017-11-07. After that date, as time permits I will update
the relevant documentation and modify the scripts to automatically close
incoming pull requests with appropriate explanation.

Pull requests will still be supported by proxy-maint. That is, pull
requests against proxy-maintained packages and new packages will be kept
open and assigned to proxy-maint team. If someone wants to, I can
include him in the exclusion list as well -- however, I'd like to avoid
keeping the list too long to avoid confusion. The generic image would be
'we use GitHub for internal work with our proxied maintainers, external
contributions go via whatever else'.

Thanks to all the people who put their work into submitting pull
requests, reviewing them and supporting us.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny