Pull Requests

[Derek Hammer]

I was wondering what is going on with Pull Requests in Cappuccino.

It seems like there is a significant amount of community involvement that has been ignored for a while now. There are several pull requests that have little to no activity in months. For example, rhwood's pull request https://github.com/cappuccino/cappuccino/pull/1229 was submitted in June and has no activity whatsoever. This is doubly damning because it is also rhwood's first pull request/code contribution to the Cappuccino framework.

I do not mean to disparage the committers to the project who spend much of their free time and effort in making Cappuccino what it is today. I know how little time I have myself without having to maintain a large web framework. Instead, I think that the community, along with the committers, need to commit to something a little more concrete than the languishing pull requests.

One solution may be to have an expiration on pull requests: they get resolved in a month. The pull request gets committed, changed and committed or closed by the time a month comes around even if the reason for closing the PR is "We didn't have time to look at this one, sorry." This prevents us from having stale pull requests and also gives a due date for all of the committers to look over a request.

-- 
Derek Hammer

[Alexander Ljungberg]

Hey,

We are preparing a "triaging" system where new pull requests are tagged with labels describing what they need to move forward. E.g. #needs-test, #needs-better-patch, #needs-documentation. This way any committer will be able to look at their request and immediately know what, if anything, is needed to get the pull request moving.

The problem is that GitHub doesn't make it very easy to tag pull requests, and when you manage to do so it is really hard to view the results. Technically every pull request already has/is an issue, but you just really can't tell from the web UI.

For instance this pull request/issue has 5 labels and an assigned committer. But I have no idea how you would figure that out from just looking at it:

https://github.com/cappuccino/cappuccino/pull/1353

So a while ago I wrote a little bot that creates proper companion tracking issues for each pull request.

https://github.com/aljungberg/cappbot

A bot feels a bit hacky, so before going down that route we reached out to GitHub to see if they would improve their UI for our use case. That was about a month ago.

Alexander

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[Mike Fellows]

I seem to recall we had a similar discussion some months ago (maybe a
year?). I thought the upshot of that discussion was that github was not
going to have exactly the tools we needed to track issues in a
"complete" fashion any time soon. Perhaps we can put the system into
place using comments on the pull requests for the time being?

Best,
Mike

>> Google Groups "Cappuccino& Objective-J Development List" group. To

[Alexander Ljungberg]

On 19 Oct 2011, at 20:00, Mike Fellows wrote:

> I seem to recall we had a similar discussion some months ago (maybe a year?). I thought the upshot of that discussion was that github was not going to have exactly the tools we needed to track issues in a "complete" fashion any time soon. Perhaps we can put the system into place using comments on the pull requests for the time being?
>

Labels are more powerful than comments since they are consistent and can be checked at a glance. When you want to know "what needs to happen for this pull request to move forward?" labels will provide a single, clear answer to that question. You don't have to read and interpret a potentially long comment thread. (CappBot uses comments to draw attention to the issue it created though.)

We did have a similar discussion before and back then I also contacted GitHub. For various reasons we thought we would have a better chance of being heard this time around.

Alexander

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[Tom Robinson]

I talked to someone at Github about it a couple days ago and they thought that we could add labels using the API, and see them in the web interface. Have we checked recently?

[Mike Fellows]

I don't disagree that having labels would be more convenient. I was
just thinking that comments could be used "in the meantime" to get the
process started.

Mike

[Alexander Ljungberg]

On 19 Oct 2011, at 20:37, Tom Robinson wrote:

> I talked to someone at Github about it a couple days ago and they thought that we could add labels using the API, and see them in the web interface. Have we checked recently?
>

Sure, and you can do that in the list view on GitHub.com as well.

The problem is that you can't view the labels in the pull request so your changes are invisible for all intents and purposes.