[LEDE-DEV] What to do when your PR stalls?

[Philip Prindeville]

Hi.

This was a bit of an issue with OpenWrt and I’m not sure if it’s starting to be a problem with LEDE or if August is just the month when all of Europe shuts down and nothing gets done…

I’m hoping it’s the latter.

Can we formalize what the procedures are for someone submitting a PR, how long they can reasonably expect a PR to go unreviewed, what are the steps when your PR languishes and you’d like to draw attention to that, etc?

When a package owner is MIA that’s one thing, and it’s a logical conclusion that if they’re not doing work on the packages that they own, they’re probably too busy to look at someone else’s PR’s as well…

But what about when you see an owner with a lot of churn on the same areas that your PR is in?  Obviously, the project or package isn’t suffering for lack of attention… so how to handle making sure your own PR’s get some attention too?

All of us want to be better contributors, I think it’s fair to say.

But it’s hard to improve when there's a lack of feedback telling you where change needs to come from.

It’s also hard to “prove your mettle” and show how capable you are if your PR’s are trickling through the process.  And as individuals, who may be contributing out of our free time, it’s hard to invest *more* time to show what valuable contributors we might potentially be if the effort that we’ve made so far is going unnoticed.

That’s not a criticism, just an observation.

So, what can we do to get everyone’s expectations on the same page about what contributors are required to do, and what they can expect in return if they meet those requirements?

Somewhat tangentially...

At one of the companies I used to work, a very large router company in the san franCisco area, was geographically distributed (much like LEDE is) with people working in all sorts of timezones.  Our BU had a policy about spending at least 30-60 minutes first thing every morning answering Code Review requests, reading and commenting on White Papers, etc. so that things wouldn’t be pushed off indefinitely and so that the already significant delay that the Sydney and Chennai teams faced with getting answers from HQ the next business day wasn’t exacerbated by procrastination, making a 1 day delay turn into 2 or three.  It was a good policy and it made a challenging situation about as smooth running as it could be.

I’m not saying that we need the structure that was rigidly imposed there to be imposed here as well: I don’t think it could be, and most of us aren’t being paid for our time.  Many of the maintainers work on a as-time-available basis, and their efforts are appreciated and we don’t want to make it less agreeable for them to keep doing the work they do.

But perhaps each of us could make a private commitment to ourselves to spend a certain percentage of our efforts fostering others, engendering collaboration, etc?  Or, if you already have, maybe do a self-check to see if you’re satisfying that commitment...

Just an idea.

-Philip