Github updated their Issues system (which includes Pull Requests). You can read about it here:

https://github.com/blog/1866-the-new-github-issues

Bugzilla is here to stay but the newly added Labels feature could probably help organize Pull Requests. The usual "Enhancement", "Bug", etc. are nice but I'm wondering if anyone can think of a way they could be used to help deal with the pull request backlog. A lot of the time it seems like there is confusion over whose court the ball is in. Maybe a "Changes Requested" label to show the pull request is waiting on the submitter to make some changes reviewers requested. A "Stalled" label could be used when the submitter isn't responding to review requests (which would eventually result in the pull request being closed).

I think assigning a state to pull requests (rather than just reading over comments) would help make the process more clear and make the status of pull requests noticeable at a glance rather than having to open each one to see what's going on.

On Monday, 28 July 2014 at 17:31:56 UTC, Brad Anderson wrote:
> [...]
> A lot of the time it seems like there is confusion over whose
> court the ball is in.

I always forget idioms probably aren't a good idea in an international community like this one.

http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/the+ball+is+in+court

> [...]

"Brad Anderson"  wrote in message news:vtizuccrwzyidddfzgbr@forum.dlang.org...

> Github updated their Issues system (which includes Pull Requests). You can read about it here:
>
> https://github.com/blog/1866-the-new-github-issues

Oh FINALLY!!!

I've wanted to use assignment and labels for a long long time but it wasn't usable without issue enabled on the repository.

> I think assigning a state to pull requests (rather than just reading over comments) would help make the process more clear and make the status of pull requests noticeable at a glance rather than having to open each one to see what's going on.

By the look of it only people with commit access can change labels, so we could also use the to control the auto-tester's auto-merge. 

On Mon, Jul 28, 2014 at 05:31:55PM +0000, Brad Anderson via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> Github updated their Issues system (which includes Pull Requests). You
> can read about it here:
> 
> https://github.com/blog/1866-the-new-github-issues
> 
> Bugzilla is here to stay but the newly added Labels feature could probably help organize Pull Requests. The usual "Enhancement", "Bug", etc. are nice but I'm wondering if anyone can think of a way they could be used to help deal with the pull request backlog.
[...]

We could adopt what we did with Phobos PRs over the last 2-3 weeks. :-)

After a rant about the PR backlog in one of those interminable rant threads, a few of us decided to stop arguing about it and instead do something about it: ping PRs that haven't been updated for a long time (changing the sorting to 'least recently updated' or 'oldest' helps find these stagnating PRs more easily), review PRs that have been sitting around with no review comments, suggest PRs be closed if there's no hope they will be merged, etc..  A few committers got a bit more aggressive about pulling PRs -- with the view that if something was a mistake, we could always revert it later, since after all that's what git is for!

The result was that the original Phobos PR backlog of about 90+ or so dropped to around 70 by the end of the week, and this morning we broke the 60 mark, and we're now down to 56. The PR list page used to be 4 pages, and now it's down to 3 and approaching 2. If this trend will continue, we should soon be able to get things down to about 1 page or so, and the situation will be much more controllable.

There was at least 1 revert that I know of from this recent effort, and 1 fixup PR to repair some flaws in a previous PR. But I see that as a good thing: we're getting things moving, getting the feedback and discussion going, and making progress in general, instead of waiting around for PRs to become ideal flawless ivory towers that also never materialize.

In contrast, the DMD PR list has breached 3 digits, and shows little sign of slowing down. Perhaps we should consider adopting a similar approach there as well? ;-)

On that note, though, the Phobos situation, while much improved, still isn't quite there yet. I'd like to invite everyone here to chime in and review PRs. As long as you can code in D, you're qualified to review *something* -- not every PR involves rocket science. Sometimes even trivial nitpick comments like minor Phobos style violations may help awaken a dormant PR and get things moving again. You don't need commit rights to contribute in this way -- I don't, for example -- but your work will be much appreciated. And I have to say that it is very gratifying to see the Phobos open PR count drop, and realize I was a part of it.


T

-- 
The best compiler is between your ears. -- Michael Abrash

"Daniel Murphy"  wrote in message news:lr6249$18pf$1@digitalmars.com... 

> Oh FINALLY!!!

I've just labelled all the DDMD pull requests.

On Monday, 28 July 2014 at 18:23:06 UTC, Daniel Murphy wrote:
>
> "Daniel Murphy"  wrote in message news:lr6249$18pf$1@digitalmars.com...
>
>> Oh FINALLY!!!
>
> I've just labelled all the DDMD pull requests.

Nice.

https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pulls?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Apr+label%3ADDMD

Way better than clicking through page after page and using Ctrl-F to find those.

On Monday, 28 July 2014 at 18:23:06 UTC, Daniel Murphy wrote:
>
> "Daniel Murphy"  wrote in message news:lr6249$18pf$1@digitalmars.com...
>
>> Oh FINALLY!!!
>
> I've just labelled all the DDMD pull requests.

This helps understand where the work is going on.
Thanks

Joseph

On 7/28/2014 12:31 PM, Brad Anderson wrote:
> Github updated their Issues system (which includes Pull Requests). You
> can read about it here:
>
> https://github.com/blog/1866-the-new-github-issues
>
> Bugzilla is here to stay but the newly added Labels feature could
> probably help organize Pull Requests. The usual "Enhancement", "Bug",
> etc. are nice but I'm wondering if anyone can think of a way they could
> be used to help deal with the pull request backlog. A lot of the time it
> seems like there is confusion over whose court the ball is in. Maybe a
> "Changes Requested" label to show the pull request is waiting on the
> submitter to make some changes reviewers requested. A "Stalled" label
> could be used when the submitter isn't responding to review requests
> (which would eventually result in the pull request being closed).
>
> I think assigning a state to pull requests (rather than just reading
> over comments) would help make the process more clear and make the
> status of pull requests noticeable at a glance rather than having to
> open each one to see what's going on.

How accessible is it possible to make the labels? Can they be made semi-publicaly editable like bugzilla's? Also, could we default to having an awaiting review label for new PRs? Perhaps even have them sorted to be at the top by default?

Heh, have written a GitHub feature request about this ~2 weeks ago, got answer "we are already working on this, going to be release soon". Have been eagerly awaiting announcement since then.

This can be very useful for improving pull request review process. I think we should not duplicate PR labels based on metadata from bugzilla and instead focus on traits useful for actual reviewing and PR categorizing (not related issue categorizing).

"DDMD" label for dmd repo is one good example - it does not have linked issues and need to be easily queried because of high priority of DDMD.

One useful label I can imagine for both DMD and Phobos repos is "need-decision" that will mark pull requests blocked until someone with authority decides if actual semantics of a change are to be accepted or rejected. That way Andrei and Walter will have a quick list of pull requests to pay special attention to (that no one else can proceed with)

At the same time I recommend avoid creation of many arbitrary label tags as those are only useful for searching pull requests if you know what labels to look for. Pure description tags give nothing over few lines of comments in PR text.

On Tuesday, 29 July 2014 at 01:35:30 UTC, Orvid King wrote:
> How accessible is it possible to make the labels?

As far as I can see one needs admin access to the repo to define new labels. Merge access is not enough - at least I don't seem to be able define new label for Phobos.

> Can they be made semi-publicaly editable like bugzilla's?

Most likely it is same as with issue labels (when you have GitHub issues enabled) - admin can define set of labels, anyone with merge access can add labels from the list to pull requests, everyone else can only view labels and search based on them.

> Also, could we default to having an awaiting review label for new PRs? Perhaps even have them sorted to be at the top by default?

All pull request are awaiting review by default ;) We should instead have labels marking those that can't be reviewed for some reason - being it a decision block, pending dependency merge or missing author.