Today while I was looking at a list of open pull requests I still had open on Github, I was surprised to see a pull request that had been opened 2 years ago that I did not recall authoring, so I clicked on the PR. Turns out, I did in fact write the pull request, and it went 2 years without so much as a comment, let alone a review from the project maintainers. This is also not the first time this has happened with my contributions to a third-party dependency I was using.
I understand the nature of open source, but I also find it negligent for some owners to abandon their projects without either archiving it or transferring ownership. I don't expect an owner to be actively developing code for their project, but reviewing the project once every 90/180/365 days? That's not a big ask, we all have 1 hour in that time we could spare to at least take a look.
There's a difference in the level of effort between fixing a broken dependency for my own need, and contributing a fix back to the dependency for everyone to benefit, so it's a true shame when those efforts can't even be acknowledged.
Top comments (11)
It looks to me like that repository has been abandoned. Most recent merged PR is about 2 years ago around time you opened yours. And there are PRs opened by dependabot 1 year ago that are still open.
There is a GitHub Action that is maintained by GitHub that does something similar and works well. So if you are looking for an alternative, check out:
Marks issues and pull requests that have not had recent interaction
Close Stale Issues and PRs
Warns and then closes issues and PRs that have had no activity for a specified amount of time.
The configuration must be on the default branch and the default values will:
Recommended permissions
For the execution of this action, it must be able to fetch all issues and pull requests from your repository.
In addition, based on the provided configuration, the action could require more permission(s) (e.g.: add label, remove label, comment, close, etc.).
This can be achieved with the following configuration in the action if the permissions are restricted:
Yeah, I have accepted it as abandoned even as I wrote this issue calling out the lack of attention.
I'll check out the GHA, much obliged for the recommendation!
I meant to add that it is rather ironic that you ran into this problem in the repository of an app whose purpose is to manage stale issues and PRs.
The irony was not lost upon me 🤣
Fork the project and keep it active :D
I knew someone was going to make this suggestion.
While yes, it's a valid path - it has a drawback. People are not going to find my fork if they search, they're going to land at the trunk package first - unless I engage in rebranding the package. That's too much work, and I wasn't necessarily volunteering to become the new maintainer, I'm simply volunteering my fixes back so others can benefit and accelerate their own implementations.
If it is about people finding the package. What worked for me in the past is open an issue in the repo that you are forking the project so people can find it more easily.
But I understand that most people don't want to volunteer and maintain other packages.
Obviously it was super important to you, since you forgot about your PR for nearly two years.
It's not about whether/not it's important to me, it's about fostering a constructive and inclusive ecosystem. Let's dial back the snark and stay constructive in our dialog please.
You wrote an entire post to call out someone for not archiving a repo for a project that they already removed from their official list of projects because you noticed that there was an open PR that you had completely forgotten about.
You also failed to keep up with that PR. You're criticizing them for their failure in open source stewardship, but you failed to even keep up with your open source contributions. They, at least, removed the project from their list of active projects, but you didn't even notice that.
Okay, that's one take, here's another: