I'm becoming more and more convinced that pull requests, at least in the "from random people passing by" sense, are just overall a terrible idea
Like, it seems to be a widespread problem that the review and processing of PRs ends up taking up more time than it would have taken to implement the feature by oneself, which seems to defeat the point of collaboration?
"But drive-by PRs are a really important way to get new contributors involved!"
Okay, but if we're relying on an unscalable, net-labour-cost model of interaction for attracting contributors, then what does that say about the health of our communities...?
I have trouble believing there are no better and more sustainable ways to achieve collaboration
(I am seriously considering just closing PR functionality on all my repos, telling people to file an issue instead, and working to find a better model of collaboration)
@joepie91 I'm really curious if you find one, because it feels like a really hard to solve issue. Dunno if closing PRs wouldn't make situation even worse though. Especially in case of libraries, it might easily lead to fracturing of projects - at least in my case, I usually contribute features I really need to libraries I use, and the moment PR is opened, it's already in use in my codebase.
@joepie91 None of my projects have ever attracted more than a small handful of PRs so I can't speak on this first hand. But I can imagine reviewing PRs can become overwhelming. Especally if they're of questionable quality or the author doesn't put in much work to follow up.