Hi,
happy new year and let's celebrate it with something cheerful - zombies!
I've noticed there are more and more pull requests on github which don't get merged to Geany. It's clear that people are fighting with time to make reviews of pull requests (and Colomban does a great job here!), however, it seems to me there are quite many patches where all the hard work has already been done (review, patch updates) and the only missing thing is the merge - which doesn't happen.
I think this is quite unfortunate - there are many patches which might be useful for users; at the same time it might be discouraging for contributors to see their patches unmerged.
I've been thinking about what may be the cause of this and several things come to my mind:
1. Not enough feedback from other developers. Typically I am for instance in the mode "I don't want to add too much noise" so unless I love or hate something, I just don't write anything. I think Colomban's own patches suffer from this most as he reviews other people's patches but there's no feedback for his own patches.
Maybe it would be a good idea if regular Geany contributors go through the pull requests from time to time and just LGTM those that sound reasonable functionality-wise. I'm not talking about full code review here, just a very quick assessment whether the given feature makes sense for Geany (we should distinguish somehow "I made a review of the patch and LGTM" and "the functionality LTGM to be in Geany").
To give an example of such a "functionality review", the fractional font sizes patch
https://github.com/geany/geany/pull/407
LGTM - even though I probably won't use it myself, I understand it may be useful for someone and it modifies just 23 lines so it's nothing intrusive and can go in from my point of view.
Such a review can be done in a few seconds so if everyone goes through the new pull requests from time to time, the patches will receive some feedback and it will be clearer whether it's something others want it in Geany.
2. Unclear status of some patches. Sometimes it might not be clear in what state the pull request is - I'd suggest adding at least the following two tags:
needs-work (reviewed with some comments that need to be addressed) work-in-progress (not meant for review in the current state)
This will help to distinguish pull requests awaiting merge and pull requests that aren't there yet.
3. Fear that the pull request isn't tested enough. I believe that if a patch did undergo a review and there doesn't seem anything obviously wrong with it, it can be merged to master. I think there's no need for some long-term private testing of a patch before it gets merged - people using the development versions of Geany should be aware it may contain bugs and should know how to deal with them. There are also more eyes so a potential bug is spotted earlier. Of course it makes sense getting more conservative towards the end of the development cycle to stabilise things.
OK, these are things that come into my mind regarding the zombie pull requests but there may be other problems. What do you think? Do the points above look reasonable to you and do you think they might help a bit? Is there anything else that might help killing the bloody zombies?
Cheers,
Jiri