How to move pull requests forward (devs, please read)
Hi everyone, and especially devs This afternoon, Nelle Varoquaux gave a short presentation at BIDS on optimistic merging, a workflow suggested by the late Pieter Hintjens. In optimistic merging, all PRs are merged into a project, and fixes happen via additional patches or reverts. While, in my mind, this is not a viable model for scikit-image, it made me think of our PR review process. A failure mode I observe often is the following: - user submits patch - review happens, often either a) nitpicking on minor things or b) asking for technically difficult tasks to be performed (rebasing, can be tricky) This introduces several problems, including discouraging new contributors, and wasting a lot of time (many PRs are left hanging for months, while waiting for a one-line fix from the original author). I'd like to request the following: - Ask contributors to open their branches for collaboration (this is on by default already, probably). - While reviewing a PR, pull down the branch, look at the diff, and fix any trivial errors you see. Push the results back up or, if collaboration is switched off, make a PR against theirs. - Keep review comments to bigger picture changes, and avoid getting bogged down in trivial fixes and stylistic changes. Let's keep it collaborative and friendly, grow our team of contributors, and get going on 0.14 :) Thanks! Stéfan P.S. A question for the git experts: I've been looking for ways of making the above process easier. I found that I can easily download pull requests: - In my ~/.gitconfig, I add the following alias (replace 'upstream' with whatever you normally call the scikit-image main repository): [alias] pullpr = "!f() { git fetch upstream pull/$1/head:pr$1 ;}; f" I can now grab a PR with: git pullpr 2447 and it will appear in the branch pr2447. Unfortunately, I don't have a similarly easy way of pushing back, other than adding the contributor's remote, and pushing back to the PR branch. Any ideas?
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Stefan van der Walt