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

[Smith, Barry F.]

> On Jan 12, 2018, at 4:32 PM, Patrick Sanan <patrick.sanan at gmail.com> wrote:
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> 2018-01-11 22:36 GMT-08:00 Smith, Barry F. <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov>:
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> > On Jan 11, 2018, at 11:40 AM, Patrick Sanan <patrick.sanan at gmail.com> wrote:
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> > 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.
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>   Very valid point. Perhaps we could have some way to convert the "proposals" to Issues so they are not lost but no longer clog the pull requests. Or the originator of the pull request (i.e. Jed) could kindly remove the pull request by converting it to some other archival form. Or at least label the pull request as Archival as opposed to active.
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> Any reason to not just create/select an issue, assign it to someone, and include the relevant branch name in the issue description? 

   Hmm, now there are two things to keep track of for each pull request (the pull request web page and the issue web page) so you've doubled the pain just so you can use the bitbucket issue assigner to know who is assigned to it.

    Put you have a very valid point. We do need to assign each pull request to someone. We could simply leave at the first comment on the pull request the assigned. For example @barrysmith you are assigned this pull request. Then that person turns on watching for the request.


  Barry

>   Barry
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> > This probably requires an itchier trigger finger on declining PRs which need substantial work.
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> > 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. 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.
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> > 2018-01-11 9:00 GMT-08:00 Smith, Barry F. <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov>:
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> >    what do people suggest to improve it.
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> >     We can't have valuable pieces of code going stale in there for months.
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