Dear upstream maintainers.

Is my approach OK or too harsh in your opinion?

2/2

@jwildeboer 10 days is a very short time. Why would anyone expect maintainers to get to their pull request that quickly when they most likely have tons of other things / life to attend to?

@teohhanhui What would be an acceptable minimal timespan in your opinion?

@jwildeboer

Your priorities seem to differ from the ones of the upstream maintainer. Did you check if other PRs were handled, maybe bug fixes that might be more urgent than just adding to the documentation.

If you delete the PR the merge will never happen, if you let it remain maybe some day it will be merged.

@jwildeboer I can't imagine a case where the upstream maintainer ignores such a PR out of malice, so while I understand the frustration, I don't think this helps anyone.

@jwildeboer be gentle, open source maintainers are people with time constraints like all of us. That pull request is not about you after all

Better to add a friendly reminder after a few weeks, if you ask me.

@jwildeboer

Depends.
If a company is behind it, maybe.
If it is a free project, it’s not O.K.
Some project only have one maintainer (or very few), he/she may be on vaction, ill, whatever.

@jwildeboer Is this the maintainers full time job or are they fitting it in when they can? Are they on vacation?

@jwildeboer I think people ignore low stake stuff when they have more urgent/important things going on.

A month would probably be more useful if you want it looked at.

@jwildeboer I think it is totally justified to no longer respond to review comments after some time. I'd consider the offering of actively working on the change to be only valid for a limited time frame.

@kinghaunst Now I need to check for new releases of the project and verify that my pull request is still correct. I will do that for a while but not for a long time.

@jwildeboer

I generally assume that what that means is that it's an unpaid developer donating their time, and not always paying attention to their project.

Surely that is unfortunate, but unless this is a big, funded operation, then yes, I think it's a bit harsh. They are probably also laboring without much outside acknowledgement.

Of course, it may also be a sign that the project is effectively dead.

@jwildeboer *cough* *cough*
https://codeberg.org/jwildeboer/jwildeboersource/issues/2
https://codeberg.org/jwildeboer/jwildeboersource/pulls/1

@jwildeboer
If it's just documentation, why not leave it there and remove it from your list? At a minimum it will show the maintainers that there is some interest in the project, or show other potential users that the project is dead (after months without being touched). So it does serve *some* purpose.

@mxfraud In that month the project could make changes that render my added documentation wrong, wasting time on their side, which is what I want to avoid. So I will check every week if my changes are still correct and hope for the bast, but when I feel that getting a burden to me, I prefer to delete the PR to keep my TODO list sane.

@jwildeboer I understand that it's frustrating if a maintainer doesn't get around to your PR quickly, but why delete it? If the maintainer gets around to it he can still proceed how they want. But as a maintainer I don't expect a contributor to still be around if a lot of time has passed.
In your specific case it's even more frustrating as the change is really small, but as a lot of maintainers do this in their spare time I don't think it's too much asked to just be patient.

@jkoan I also feel responsible for my PR, so I now feel the need to check at least once a week if my PR still contains valid information or if something has changed in the project that forces corrections, perhaps a rewrite. Outdated PRs are even more annoying to maintainers, I talk from experience.

@joschi hahaha @jwildeboer