I experience Frappe team and forum as a great community, but had some really frightening experiences on GitHub as a first time contributor to frappe/frappe.
During our app development, we stumbled over several bugs and opened an issue and pulled a request in order to fix the issue. We respected the contribution guidelines and code formatting and fullfilled every commit pre-checks. However, for all three of these PR, we never got any feedback or code review for any of these PR… besides the stale-bot after months of inactivity.
This feels like an total waste of time contributing to frappe/frappe. I do understand that frappe team or the community cannot check on every issue, but IMHO at least pending pull requests should have a high priority. This doesn’t seem to be the case, which leaves us with no other option than to stop contributing.
Is there any reason for this? Any way to get our PR merged or reviewed?
I think this was addressed at the Frappe Build conference earlier this year. Since the Frappe team usually gets a lot of these contributions, they usually don’t look at them unless you tag them to notify them. I’m not sure if that’s the official policy or not, but just mentioning the person responsible for that part of the codebase would help I guess.
As @rmehta said in the build conference to the same question i had raised, build the confidence with smaller fixes and tag responsible people. If you don’t get any responses then tag rushab himself
I am still astonished by this process, which, in my experience, is not communicated clearly and could lead to lost contributions (which is sad for our community as a whole).
How are newcomers supposed to know who’s responsible for each part of the codebase, and who to tag/mention? Read through the various Issues and PRs, and make wild guesses? I suppose that eventually you’d stumble upon the answer. But it’s unnecessary friction that probably scares away many potential contributors.
Many years ago, this kind of information could be found easily. But no longer. Even here on the forums, there’s no way of knowing which Users are maintainers or employees at Frappe Technologies, versus Users that are ordinary community members.
I can definitely understand why the maintainers aren’t always interested in external PRs, but I agree it would be a very good thing if there were clear statements to that end. It can be very frustrating putting work into something under the assumption that it will be valued and then find out that it isn’t.
Be prepared for re-opening PR, refactor as per comments and updates users share, even after that it may get closed. Re-open again and repeat. DO NOT Re-open only if any team member concluded that PR will not be accepted!