Hacker News Reader

Comment by leetrout | Hacker News Reader

To be explicit: I agree.

But I still think it's basic decency to close the PR and tell them No. Or if you plan to leave it around make a comment to that effect.

View on HN

There are many projects where just doing that would be the equivalent of a full time position. Even saying no requires a skilled review.

Is there no way to just have a script add a comment on every new PR saying "Due to insufficient staff, your PR may not be reviewed for a considerable amount of time."?

Your code is important to us. Please stay on the line, and the next available reviewer will answer your code. Due to unusually high code volumes, this response may take longer than usual.

Something like that?

All that's missing is an autoplay embed with some hold muzak ;-)

I think the issue is about letting people know that PRs won't be reviewed/merged before they bother putting a lot of effort into them (both the commit itself and setting up/documenting the PR).

If you are rejecting all PRs, that doesn't require skilled review -- a bot can do it.

Are you really open source in spirit at that point though?

Yes. Both the cathedral and the bazaar are valid approaches to OSS project management, with pros and cons.

For those curious apart from myself:

Cathedral -> centralized control Bazaar -> decentralized control

https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/511/whats-the...

"open source" doesn't mean "accepting drive-by contributions from unknown authors". "open source" means "open source". If you want to apply your patches, you're free to fork the repo.

A bot should do it. Because sometimes people throw a tantrum, so it's easier to just ignore a PR. Or a maintainer might post a quick reply, only to be bitten later on. I love and live by open source, but the drama can be exhausting.

It would be nice if you could turn off accepting pull requests whilst keeping the project alive.

This has always been a weird quirk of GitHub. You can disable issues, boards, wikis, but pull requests cannot be toggled. It's a pain point for lots of projects: those closed to contributions, those which are not primarily code (issues-only), those that use a different platform for review (e.g. Gerrit), ...

Why does GitHub persist? It's not like forcing the feature enabled helps anyone. The maintainers will still not merge if they don't want to. There are bots in the marketplace that will close PRs with a message. GitLab has a toggle. Why is this so important to GitHub?

They are currently not reviewing or merging PRs, closing them to only later reopen or whatever is probably even more overhead.

I think if it is made clear "don't hold your breath" and someone decides to contribute anyway, well, it's only fair to wait.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com