In edx-platform, it can be hard to decide what team should review a pull request. Often it requires technical understanding of the changes. We have a CODEOWERS, but it’s incomplete, and GitHub points out that it has errors. I don’t know if CODEOWNERS could do the job even if it was fully fleshed out.
I don’t think it’s productive to make sweeping generalizations about how open source projects work. For example, Python has 1522 open pull requests, only 50 of which are less than two weeks old. Many have comments on them, but 791 have the label “awaiting review.”
We all want to reduce the time it takes to review pull requests. We want to enable and speed contribution. But we have to solve our problems, whatever they are. There isn’t just one way that open source projects work. Making unfair comparisons to unnamed projects doesn’t help us find solutions.
I don’t understand the logic of this. If pull requests need review by the maintainer, then they need review, no matter how old they are. If pull requests can instead be reviewed by core contributors, we should let those reviews happen no matter how new the pull request is.
This sounds roughly like, “review the PR, or we’re going to do it whether you like it or not.” You say, “even if it’s just to say no”, but that could turn into auto-closing pull requests once they are two weeks old. I don’t think anyone would like that.
I would like to understand more about which repos are experiencing the longest delays, and try to understand why that is.