[petsc-dev] Our pull request work flow is terrible and horrible

[Smith, Barry F.]

> On Jan 11, 2018, at 1:45 PM, Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Jan 11, 2018 at 12:40 PM, Patrick Sanan <patrick.sanan at gmail.com> wrote:
> One idea is to impose a stricter guideline that things on the bitbucket PR page are things that everyone is actively trying to merge. That way, maintainers can just look at the bottom of the list to see what's lagging, instead of having to to work up the list and try to remember which of the PRs are WIP or proposals or experiments or even abandoned ideas. 
> 
> This probably requires an itchier trigger finger on declining PRs which need substantial work.
> 
> A related point is that (as happened with the last PR I made), if a big edit is performed after the original PR is made or even approved, then it's not always clear "whose court" the PR is in.
> 
> The only way to fix this, I think, is to assign PRs to people. That is the only way petsc-maint works. I of course do not want
> this because it will suck, but I cannot think of anything else.

  So if no one volunteers in, say 24 hours, then someone or some automatic system should assign it?* You are right that orphaned pull requests are usually the reason for the delay and the person submitting the pull request doesn't know how aggressive they should be in badgering us to do something about their pull request.

   Barry

It doesn't help that Bitbucket isn't so good at contacting all relevant people about a pull request quickly.

> 
>   Matt
>  
> Maybe it's better to just make a new PR in this situation. I'm not sure if bitbucket allows you to decline your own PR (I fear not) - that would make this easier.
> 
> 2018-01-11 9:00 GMT-08:00 Smith, Barry F. <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov>:
> 
>    what do people suggest to improve it.
> 
>     We can't have valuable pieces of code going stale in there for months.
> 
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> 
> -- 
> What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments lead.
> -- Norbert Wiener
> 
> https://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~knepley/