PRs now going back 18 months -- let's close the clearly dead ones

[Ryan Schmidt]

> On Jul 25, 2020, at 15:38, Ken Cunningham wrote:
> 
> There are ancient PRs that are never going to be committed in the queue.
> 
> This is just noise, and prevents us from keeping things moving.
> 
> The people who opened them seem attached to them, but they are clearly dead and need to be closed.
> 
> If in agreement, can one of the admins close the 50 oldest ones at least and let’s move on to something we can focus on.
> 
> We don’t want the PR queue to start to look like the (ridiculous) ticket list, with dormant open tickets going back decades.
> 
> Ken

I appreciate your housekeeping efforts but it shouldn't surprise you that I would not be in favor of closing a PR just because it is old.

For example, among the 50 oldest open PRs is one filed by the maintainer of boost to update it to the latest version. How would closing it help anything? The update still needs to be done. Some work has already been put into that update by its maintainer. Closing the PR would just make it harder to find for anyone who wants to help finish it. There are other old open PRs for updating glib2-devel and gobject-introspection and other ports. Those updates should still happen. Closing the PRs will just delay getting those updates done, because it will make it harder to find all the existing discussion about the difficulties involved in doing that update.

The ridiculous ticket list is similarly important. Just because a bug report is 1 or 2 years old or whatever doesn't mean it is no longer relevant. It may just mean that the maintainer has forgotten about it, or doesn't know how to fix whatever the problem is, or that the port has no maintainer. Each open ticket represents an opportunity for any interested individual to study a problem to see if it still exists and if so to attempt to help resolve it. This is an activity that can and should occur any time, all the time. You may complain that we have many open tickets, but, well, that's because we have a lot of ports and evidently not enough people trying to solve the problems.

Of course, if there are open tickets or PRs that are "clearly dead" as you put it then they should be closed. In this category for me would be PRs proposing changes that we do not want, tickets for ports that are deleted, or for updates that have already happened, or for bugs that no longer exist or where we cannot reproduce the bug and the user has not responded with additional information we requested, etc.