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Rahul Kumar
Rahul Kumar

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How to tell if an open-source project will answer your pull request

#opensource #beginners #github #productivity

Before you send a pull request to a project you don't know, ask one question first: will anyone answer it?

I followed 1.4 million pull requests to 11,000 GitHub projects to see how much the answer varies. A lot.

At some projects, half the outside pull requests get a human reply within about 30 minutes. At more than 1 in 8 of the projects I could judge, most outsiders hear nothing for two weeks.

The check

  1. On the project's GitHub page, open Pull requests and search for is:pr is:closed.
  2. Open five recent ones whose authors are not labelled Member, Owner or Collaborator. Those labels mark insiders.
  3. For each, note how long the first comment or review from a human took. Skip bots.

If most of the five heard back within a day or two, that's a good sign. If they waited weeks, yours may too.

What normal looks like

Bar chart of 2,300 ranked projects by their median wait for a first human reply: under 1 hour 62, 1 to 3 hours 151, 3 to 6 hours 193, 6 to 12 hours 316, 12 to 24 hours 492, 1 to 3 days 573, 3 to 7 days 274, 1 to 2 weeks 128, over 2 weeks 111. 1,214 projects, more than half, have a median first reply under a day.

At 2,300 projects there were enough replies to time. At more than half of them, the median first reply comes within a day, and one in ten takes longer than a week.

So if you've waited a week, you're past the median at 9 in 10 of these projects. A short, polite comment asking whether anything is needed from you is fair at that point.

The fast end

Bar chart of the median time to a first human reply on outside pull requests: Ebiten 0.5 hours, Nomad 0.6 hours, cargo 1.4 hours, Servo 1.4 hours, k3s 1.7 hours, Stockfish 2.3 hours, Click 2.5 hours, React Hook Form 2.8 hours. The median across 2,300 ranked projects: 22 hours.

These eight are well known and quick. Ebiten and Nomad have a median first reply of about half an hour; cargo, Servo, k3s, Stockfish, Click and React Hook Form all come in under three hours. If you want a quick answer on a first contribution, they are good places to start.

A high star count is no guarantee

12 of the 100 most-starred projects leave most outside pull requests with no human answer for two weeks. Stars measure popularity. Whether anyone reads the queue is a separate question.

Skip the counting

Porchlamp does this count for 2,300 projects. Each project's page opens with its median first reply and the share of outside pull requests that got no reply within two weeks. I built it.

How I counted
I followed 1,442,863 pull requests from 227,260 outside contributors to 11,000 GitHub projects, from 25 April to 22 October 2026 (Porchlamp's snapshot of 25 October 2026). Bots, drafts, pull requests their authors closed, brand-new accounts and each project's own members are not counted. A project is judged when it is licensed, maintained software with at least 10 counted outside pull requests; 4,168 were. "Most outsiders hear nothing" means a black hole: with 95% confidence, more than half of those pull requests got no human reply, review, merge or close within 14 days. Reply times come from the 2,300 ranked projects with enough timed replies. For projects with more than 2,000 pull requests, replies are read on an even random sample of 1,000. I picked the eight named projects from the fast group; each had at least 100 timed outside pull requests.

What's the longest you've waited on a pull request, and did it ever get merged?

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