Clearer guidance for pull request contributors to get followup

[chrahunt]

What's the problem this feature will solve?

As mentioned over in #6606, it can be frustrating to submit a PR and have no activity on it for some time. That can be interpreted a number of ways by a contributor and very few of them positive.

We should provide a clear and encouraged mechanism for getting followup on PRs and communicate that explicitly in places that potential and current contributors are likely to see it.

Describe the solution you'd like

The mechanism for getting followup could be:

1. manually commenting on the PR itself, assuming maintainers are following the repo or that specific PR
2. manually @ing a reviewer for followup
3. /request-review - mentioned in CONTRIBUTING. Does this work? Also what is the review queue?
4. requesting review - permission-wise is this available to general contributors?

The places that contributors are likely to see it:

1. the PR template, which shows up every time a PR is being opened
2. CONTRIBUTING.md, which appears as a pop-over next to the PR input for first-time contributors
3. the pip dev documentation, which is probably referenced by people that need a reminder and on first contribution (but is not linked to

These are not ideal since I don't think any of them would necessarily be visible to the people that need it most. We could include some automation to post links to the above when a review seems to be going stale, or directly take action (like requesting review)

Alternative Solutions

• Do nothing
• Not have any pending PRs

Additional context

• Fix PEP 517 builds for packages without setup.py #6606

[pradyunsg]

/request-review

Not sure tbh. I'll take a look at what pypa-bot and browntruck are doing w.r.t. this.

permission-wise is this available to general contributors?

No. From https://help.github.com/en/articles/requesting-a-pull-request-review:

Note: Pull request authors can't request reviews unless they are either a repository owner or collaborator with write access to the repository.

Not have any pending PRs

In, how do we get there? 😉

[pradyunsg]

One thing that could help with this, is #7306.

[deveshks]

Hi @chrahunt , @pradyunsg

I would say that having something like this is a great way to ensure continuous and long-living involvement from contributors.

I have started contributing to pip around 2 weeks back, and I have been able to get around 7 PR's pushed (though most of them are not very complicated) and 6 open PR's. All the maintainers have been great in responding to all my questions, though as mentioned, a more systematic guidance of how to follow up on the PRs would be a best way to keep both the maintainers and contributors engaged. Hence I was also wondering if this something I can help document?

If yes, which document can I start with making the necessary updates (I see PR template, CONTRIBUTING.md and dev doc as three places noted for the same) and what kind of things are we looking to add.

[ziebam]

What's the status of this issue?

As a beginner I can understand people's frustration (as showcased in #6606), and having clearer guidance would be very helpful, even in the form of some independent resource on common practices or OSS savoir-vivre (like Setting expectations for open source participation).

For example, while it's probably acceptable to explicitly ping a maintainer when the PR is going stale, for a newcomer it intuitively seems pushy. When bumping #10459, I eventually settled on proposing another solution along with the ping so that it wouldn't seem rude or passive-aggressive.

As for where to put such guidance, I think the PR template and Development documentation would be sufficiently visible for most contributors.