What should infrequent contributors do to get reviewed PRs merged?

Development
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Hi all,

I’m not a frequent contributor to nixpkgs and I don’t spend a lot of time on discourse. Thus, when I submit a PR for nixpkgs, I’m always puzzled what should I do. Over time, I noticed there is more automation, so sometimes maintainers are automatically pinged to review the PR. However, I couldn’t find any document that explains the process nixpkgs uses for contributions. There is https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/25faee19ff201bdb92c2e23d3b7e0ad1c4c3e883/CONTRIBUTING.md, but it only talks about formatting of the PR and commits, not how we go from submitting something to having that PR becoming part of nixpkgs.

The reason I started writing this post is because I have this PR: refurb: init at 1.7.0 by knl · Pull Request #193309 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub – it got reviewed/approved by two reviewers*, but I don’t know what should happen next, who’s responsible for merging it? I can’t, since I don’t have write access. Should I ping the reviewers again? Do they have the write access?

  • Another thing that was not clear from the labels is how many reviewers are needed for the PR? Nothing is written neither in the PR template text nor CONTRIBUTING.md file.
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You can post them here PRs ready for review _ where I check every day or directly request a review from me.

The count does not matter, more the knowledge of the people reviewing. It is totally fine if someone merges things straight away and there could be PRs which have 5 approvals but that have still major technical problems.

No one but everyone who has merge rights could merge it.

No, they don’t otherwise their review would be green.

It is basically: someone comes around and thinks it is mergeable and merges it.

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Thanks for reporting this. @lucperkins is working on improving documentation for contributors, and @drupol had PRs to illustrate various parts the process. You may be interested to get in touch.

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