Issues and pull requests are largely getting ignored

[Benjamin Kaduk]

On Tue, Mar 26, 2019 at 02:20:28PM +0100, Kurt Roeckx wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 26, 2019 at 09:53:22AM +0000, Matt Caswell wrote:
> > 
> > So the real problem there is a mismatch between the opening rate and the closing
> > rate, i.e. it is NOT that we are ignoring these issues. I see it more as a
> > resource issue - we are seeing issues raised at a greater rate than we have
> > resources to handle.
> 
> Or that the resources we do have are spend on the wrong thing.

One might, perhaps, try to measure distribution of time between
[pull-request/issue] submission and the first comment on it.
Consider
https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/8108
and
https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/7943 (both submitted by users that
are now project members), that have both been open for months and still
have no comments!

> > I can't do the same analysis for PRs because github doesn't detect properly when
> > we merge PRs (because we don't use the github facility for doing that). I would
> > expect to see somewhat similar numbers though.
> 
> The amount of open pull requests has been around 200 for the last
> few months, so it seems we can just keep up with that currently,
> but it used to be around 100.
> 
> So I think that in general we do not have enough resources to keep up
> with both the pull requests and issues.

Not if we want to keep up the pace of new development towards the goals for
the next major release, I agree.
(Not that I am doing much to contribute, myself, at this point -- my AD
role in the IETF keeps me quite busy.)

-Ben