YSK: Guide on getting your PR merged

I wrote a little blog post advising on how to best work with the Nixpkgs PR process from a committer’s perspective. Since this would be helpful to any contributor, I decided to just make this official contributor documentation instead.

If you have open PRs that aren’t going anywhere or have always felt frustrated contributing to Nixpkgs, this might help you.

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Thanks for this! I’ve been very demoralized that I can’t get anyone to look at my 6 month old version bump to the Crystal compiler, despite posting in the PR ready to review thread, and pinging the maintainers on github. But your guide mentions to try asking in Matrix, which I hadn’t thought of doing. So thanks for the idea of something new to try <3

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It’s understandable, and as Atemu rightly points out, it’s the contributor’s responsibility to make the PR as easy to review as possible, stay responsive to feedback, keep the PR moving, and ping if needed.

In your case, you did all the right things, and version bumps tend to be quick to review.

Since no one merged it despite all these factors in your favour, and of course there is no way to force committers to take interest in the PR, the only thing to do (to avoid becoming frustrated) is to forget about the PR until it’s merged or you get pinged again about it. I historically took the approach of sending a larger volume of PRs so that I didn’t get too frustrated over one single PR.

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