Work with the community - improve community PR visibility

By @bjoern:

  • It is important to react on community PRs early
  • It is really frustrating if you put a lot of time and energy into a PR in
    your spare time and nobody cares (or it looks like nobody cares)
  • A PR doesn’t have to be perfect. If it implements a functionallity we want
    and if it works: merge it. We can still iterate on it, improve it, add more
    tests, etc
  • We could try to establish a rule: Within 10 days we need a decision: merge or
    close.
  • Possible process implementation:
    • Have a GitHub bot which detects community PRs
    • Notify all core contributors and maybe the “feature maintainer” (if
      something like this exists) about the new PR (this should be a
      personal mail, github mentions get missed easily)
    • Now we have 10 days to review and decide
    • After 5 days the bot could re-send a reminder
    • We don’t get hundreds of PRs every day. In average it is probably 1-2
      or even less
    • If we can find a way to highlight them and have a common commitment
      (like the 10 days rules) we can really make a difference

I for myself am really precise about my github notifications and I want as few emails as possible. So this needs to be done in a way that works for everybody. I’m fine with the soft commitment of all of us to take care of this. If we get time allocated for this crucial part I guess it’s easier to simply browse the PRs because you are not forced to do the next feature/bug fix.

As far as I know there is no GitHub option to filter Pull Requests by “Non Core Contributors”. And even it it would exists everybody would need to perform the search manually on a regular basis. I would be highly surprised if this works in the long run.

My idea was that we should really highlight this pull request so that we don’t oversee them and we take a decision in time. I don’t think you have expect more than 1 pull request per day on average, so don’t worry about a email overdose :wink:

1 Like

I simply don’t like emails as notification work around :wink: But we will see. We had a mention bot in the Github repo. Maybe we could pimp that one to notify people :wink:

Seeing how this is public stuff and @jyaworski also said on IRC that he would love to help manage the pull requests, I’d say we open this topic up. @MorrisJobke @bjoern you agree? :slight_smile:

I opened it and moved it to the “meta” category.

Now @jyaworski could also join this here :slight_smile:

I do not plan to contribute to this project, but I do contribute to others. As others have stated, I too hate email notifications.

In regard to PR handling, Someone needs to be tasked with adding tags to make them easily searchable. If it can be scripted, all the better.

Simply tag all inbound PR with community or core team or some such moniker in addition to any other useful tags.

It makes them easily searchable and then they can be prioritized and merged or closed in whatever time frame is noted for general responses.

1 Like

Hey @JaredBusch. That’s a good point. I’m going to be partially responsible, at least, for tagging PRs. If you have any further recommendations, please let me know. We are looking into using Github templates for PRs and issues for standardization as well.

I would offer to contribute, but my skillset does not include PHP applications like this.

Neither does mine. I’m a Ruby guy. :slight_smile: