Hey everyone! First of all let me say I love the Exercism platform and community and I’m very impressed by what you all have managed to build here.
I wanted to ask about a topic relating to contributions, I hope this here is the most appropriate place to ask them.
Two weeks ago I updated this issue in the C++ track and submitted this pull request to help with it. At first some tests failed but I updated the PR and it’s been waiting for maintainer approval to run the pipelines on it ever since.
My questions are relating to the appropriate etiquette when it comes to stale PRs in this community. Should I bring this up with someone? Should I wait and trust the maintainers to approve the workflows when they can? My worry is that the PR will keep being stale, as there already are some PRs that in my eyes are ready to be merged dating back to January. At the same time, I feel iffy about GitHub pinging in a new community even if it’s what I would do at work.
Related topic, I can’t seem to see the contributing channel on the Discord server even though I selected the role. I’m not clear on which channel is most appropriate to ask these kinds of questions.
Thanks for the lovely message, and also for your desire (and actions!) in contributing.
I think after a couple of weeks of not hearing back, it’s definitely ok to check in on the PR. Something like “Gentle nudge in case this got lost in notifications. No pressure if you’re busy/away etc! Please let me know if I can help move this along” would be very well received by me and I hope the other maintainers.
In this case, @vaeng is in a lot of cross-track teams and his notifications are probably unruly at best! I definitely lose things in notifications all the time, so I think after a couple of weeks, it’s fine to presume that might have happened and nudge accordingly. It might also be the case that the reviewer doesn’t feel that they should merge without another review, and so there’s sort of an action-void. In this case, @vaeng reopened, but AFAICT didn’t comment, so he might just have been undoing the auto-action rather than “owning” the PR. Again, nudging in a gentle way will likely answer that. (I’m labouring the point slightly, as this post will likely become canonical ).
Discord only has internal contributing channels for org members. We try and stick to discussion on the forum for other things, as the pace tends to work better here.
Thanks again (oh, and @vaeng, gentle nudge on that PR in case this got lost in notifications. No pressure if you’re busy/away etc! Please let me know if I can help move this along )
I only use github for open source work, so I am not that organized using it, to be frank (never been paid for any work I have done there). I have email notifications activated on a few repos. However, I often forget emails so the track I maintain, e.g Crystal and Swift. You can send me a dm on discord (meatball is my name there) when you open the pr or whenever (I don’t bother, and I know I forget this quite often), there are periods in the year I am busy and I will tell that if that is the cause but most often than not have I just forgot.
Luckily quite often other maintainers of the tracks will review prs if I miss.
The PR is moving towards resolution and I know how to act if it happens again. It’s a pleasure to contribute here and you can expect more from me in the future!
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