Agility

[Mojca Miklavec]

On 25 April 2018 at 18:23, Chris Jones wrote:
>
>> I have one request though. You are sometimes asking people to close
>> the PRs because you don't want unfinished PRs in the queue. I would
>> like to suggest adding a special label to such PRs before closing
>> them, saying something like "workneeded". I would occasionally like to
>> be able to search for such contributions. These are contributions that
>> are basically welcome / needed / acceptable, they only need a bit more
>> expertise or just some simple touch before they could be merged. I
>> would like to distinguish contributions that are closed because they
>> are wrong / obsolete / replaced by another PR, from those that have
>> been closed just because the work was not 100% complete, and if
>> someone has time to look at them, they could be fixed and merged.
>
> I don't think there is any need to re-invent our own system here. There is
> an already standard why of dong this, which is to declare the request as
> 'Work In Progress'. This is trivially done by adding 'WIP' to the start of
> the PR title.
>
> https://github.com/apps/wip
>
> Doing this should prevent the MR being merged, and make it clear the author
> is still working on something, but want to submit the MR now for other
> reasons (like not to forget it, or start to get comments etc.). I use this
> regularly in other systems at work and it works really well...
>
> We should allow (encourage even) WIP PRs to be submitted, when the work is
> in a state that warrants it.

OK, I would agree with a WIP label. I believe I actually made such a
label once, but it was later deleted since others argued that WIP PRs
should not be submitted.

I admit that I do find value in WIP PRs from time to time. Like ...
someone submitting an update to a library that needs coordinated
update with dependent ports that need to be tested individually. But
there are plenty other examples. Trac can be used, but GitHub has
advantages.

As long as one can clearly distinguish WIP PRs from the others, I
don't think it's too important whether they are open or closed. Or if
they are open for a while, and if they don't converge within a
reasonable timeframe, "temporarily" close them (but keep them easily
searchable with WIP label).

Trac is quite ok for bug reports, but much less suitable for (nearly)
ready patches. GitHub on the other hand has drawbacks when the number
of issues grows.

Mojca