Management of PRs, issues, and threads

[Nelle Varoquaux]

Hi scikit-image folks!


> We've had a couple of community fails on GitHub recently:
> https://github.com/scikit-image/scikit-image/pull/1474#issuecomment-241283056
> https://github.com/scikit-image/scikit-image/issues/2080
> (The last one is missing a presumably-deleted comment where someone outside
> the project recommended to a potential contributor to just fork the
> project!).

Being the person that reported one of those community fails, I'd like
to say that I've had great experience with the scikit-image community
overall. Contributors are (usually) very well welcomed, feedback is
friendly, and we can have discussion and debates about "hot" topics
(like dropping python2.7) in a friendly and nice environment. I've
recently contributed to another scientific python project where many
members of the community were aggressive in their reviews, without
giving valuable feedback on PRs, so I value scikit-image's (&
scikit-learn) community even more.

> That's just the couple I've noticed, I'm sure there are lots more. We
> definitely have many, many abandoned PRs from >1y, >2y ago.
>
> Obviously, something in our process isn't working. I don't have immediate
> solutions, but here's a couple of suggestions:
>
> - we need a system to assign core devs to PRs/issues. Currently, it's too
> easy for all of us to go, "someone else on the team will handle this". We
> need a fair way to assign a manager to each issue/PR. The assigned dev
> wouldn't necessarily be responsible for review, but they would be
> responsible for chasing up other reviewers.
>
> - NEVER close a PR without the explicit consent of the contributor, OR after
> the contributor has been non-responsive for e.g. 1mo and two pings. In this
> last situation I would even suggest that we need two core devs to sign off.

I would not close old PR, for the sake of closing them. If the
contributor is not interested in finishing the contribution and the
patch is almost ready, it might be a good way to introduce new
contributors (/students) to the PR. This can probably be done by an
"Need contributor" tag + "Easy fix", though I haven't thought more
about this

> Other suggestions welcome in this thread. We should try to get a new process
> hammered out very soon.
>
> I also want to acknowledge @soupault for his triage/labelling work, which is
> a massive step in the right direction. But we need to follow up his triage
> with some actual process.
>
> Juan.
>
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