We've had the ability to temporarily disable PR's for a while for maintainers but we felt like it was time to look at this again and see what folks think.
Also I don't find GitLab that much better. I remember the feature request for "Give option to disable automatic adding of 'Closes ISSUE' to merge requests" closed with "Why would you need an option for that, everyone either loves it or likes manually removing it every time.
Disabling PRs is just the first step in giving maintainers more control over their PR experience. We're exploring several longer-term ideas which you can learn more about in this discussion: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/185387
Please keep the ideas, questions, or concerns coming in either thread. Would love to keep hearing your thoughts!
these communities and projects are still vulnerable to the AI and spam PRs. for those kind of people how can this help.
My suggestion on this take you should add an option to maintainer to flag the user if they are doing spam and ai slop so if it exceed to a x number it will ban the user.
I know this is against the open source philosophy but still it will prevent the open source community from being polluted.
https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.m...
Here is what it looks like in practice:
Maybe, a "Contributor Requests".
It would be a gate for new contributors. For maintainers, they would see what they have contributed to and see their new PR. It would show "open contributor requests"
Once approved, The PR will then appear under PRs.
And obviously this is opt in.
Open source doesn't mean labor should be free. Would be a great way to support maintainers etc spending time investigating bug reports etc.
When PRs are spammed, it's impractical to discuss each submitted change. The existence of the PRs interferes with the ability of maintainers to continue making directed changes.
> We should be using ai to chunk changes into reviewable bytes and to align on semantics and contracts.
That statement is a convoluted version of the narcissist's entitlement. ie "other people should realize my vision".
Also worth stating that I have been ranting about contract first reviews for 10 years and it’s not just in response to llm written code.
I want to know how many PRs a project is getting, but more than that how receptive the maintainers are. Issues don't tell the whole picture, because work gets backlogged, and you can't expect people doing this for free to have an SLA or something. but PRs.. the work is ideally at least mostly done.
There is the one project for example, very popular in the industry it's used in. There is a specific use-case that I run into repeatedly, that it fails at. The project has lots of open issues (understandably), and there are multiple PRs to address that, but the maintainers give no good reason for not accepting it. I've been using some random guy's branch (who isn't even keeping up with the latest releases and backporting) for many years now, waiting for the maintainers to either reject it or accept the PR. Lots of people upvote, comment, and beg.
I want to see how maintainers handle that. This is really bad. I'd prefer if they stopped reporting of issues instead of PRs. Issues is providing support, PRs let other people who fixed something or added a feature attempt to contribute.
You can't just "fork it", that means you have to be the maintainer now. And how will people even find your "fork" which may have fixed things? I'd like to be able to at least find open and unmerged forks with a fix in place I could apply, even if the maintainer never got around to it.
Turning PRs off is the software equivalent of hardware makers turning off support for aftermarket parts.
Honestly, if you don't like PRs, ignore them like many already do. Does it look bad when you do that? Yes. As it should! Don't hide away from your preferences, own it. Let other people get access to fixes you either have no time to get to, or unwilling to implement.
Just the discussions alone on security related issues (or PRs as in this case) is telling sometimes.
Congrats on discovering the difference between “““Open Source””” (pro-corporate; a way to socially engineer people to do work for you for free from which you can turn around and profit) and Free Software!
“THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.”
“The ‘open source’ label was created at a strategy session held on February 3rd, 1998 in Palo Alto, California, shortly after the announcement of the release of the Netscape source code. […] The conferees believed the pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape to release their code illustrated a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community. The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label ‘free software.’”
I do agree that GitHub could do more to highlight forks and their relationship to one another. But I don't think the current way - having an open pull request - is the only way to do that.
As a former maintainer, I am very in favor of this move. After having spent 10 years or so being hounded with "Any update on this?" and "Can we get this merged?", I don't think I would ever do it again as long as there aren't controls in place to be able to set the expectation that the code is free to do with as you will, and please go ahead and fork if you want it to do something different.
I think you and others on this thread have the problem of not being able to ignore people. But that's your problem entirely. If you want a feature to silence PR notifications, by all means, I have no problem with that. You're taking out your notification annoyance by taking away a critical feature from your users. That's just petty and mean in my opinion.
Heck, does your email client not have the feature to auto-sort emails to junk/deleted? Is there any frustration you have beyond that?
Edit: this probably came off quite abrasive, but I'm getting entitled comments from users with no contributions, demanding fixes for their most ridiculously niche issues almost weekly. Like stuff doesn't build with their toolchain from 2014. Seriously? Yet, they can't be arsed to even check the fixes or follow up with basic details.
I'm not wondering why that PR is not accepted, maintainers have every right to ignore or reject PRs. But this discussion is about taking away the ability to even create PRs that other users of the software an discover. This is a user-hostile behavior fueled solely by laziness and pettiness.
