Also, I believe that in this discussion a lot of emphasis is put on PRs
that are stuck because nobody seems to be willing to make a decision.
I think this is a consequence of 2 things:
-
We generally have nice people in our community that don’t want to piss somebody else off
-
We don’t have formal, explicit documentation of workflows (the why we do things in a certain way) which means no way to escalate
I have merged stuff that had quite some disagreements with a “unless somebody comes up with a compelling argument against this 1 week from now, I’ll go ahead and merge this”. At the same time, I have also accommodated changes that I disagreed with simply because the other person cared more about this specific issue than I did.
It would make things easier if we could simply say “please make these changes because this document tells us to do so”. It would also be great to be able to ping somebody in case of conflict (conflict is a little to harsh for this admittedly), which would allow us to do “I want this and XXX wants that. @somebody, please pick one”.
We have old PRs from both old and new contributors that have gotten stuck and it is a terrible signal to send when we want more hands on deck (hey, I’m guilty of this too).