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

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Oct 30, 2017 at 7:50 PM, Andreas K. Huettel
<dilfridge@g.o> wrote:
> Am Dienstag, 31. Oktober 2017, 00:17:38 CET schrieb Michał Górny:
>>
>> 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.
>
> At the moment we have 22508 open bugs in bugzilla... should we maybe close
> that too?

++

Open bugs/PRs that are no longer relevant are noise, but open bugs/PRs
that are still valid are actually signal.  The more of these that you
leave open, the greater the chance that one will get fixed.

Sure, lots of ignored issues does say something about the project, but
I think we also need to manage the expectation that volunteers will
always fix issues the moment they're reported.  If one checks in once
every six months to clean up some bugs, that is still better than if
they didn't check in at all.  Simply closing real issues is treating
the symptom and not the underlying issue (which probably can only be
treated if people step up, and having PRs probably makes that easier
if anything).

The biggest concern (IMO) would be if an issue languishes as a PR when
it might be fixed if it were a bug.  I think some automation might
help there, but I am skeptical of the idea that somebody who
completely ignores a PR would suddenly start paying attention if it
were a bug.

-- 
Rich