How can the community help improve the approval process for PRs?

[cesarcoatl]

I have been contributing to Homebrew for a little over a year, but only recently I have seen that some PRs go without approval for days, especially on the cask-versions repo; which is where I contribute the most.

I am aware that having humans go through each PR is not an easy task, and something that I appreciate from maintainers like @miccal, @bevanjkay, @Rylan12, @cho-m, et. al.

Also I am aware that at least the Casks I tend to update (azure-data-studio-insiders and visual-studio-code-insiders) auto-update, and if a user installs a version that's not current, it will update automatically. So no harm here.

So back to my question.

How can the community help improve the approval process for PRs?

Thanks!

[neutric]

Making it pain free, that is if the maintainers just have to merge, tends to speed things up. So contribute by guiding other contributors on their way to a merge-ready PR.

[cesarcoatl]

Thanks for clarifying that @bevanjkay.

In my particular case I created three PRs for azure-data-studio-insiders:

Homebrew/homebrew-cask-versions#13392 (merged by @bevanjkay 🎉 )
Homebrew/homebrew-cask-versions#13390 (closed and opened Homebrew/homebrew-cask-versions#13392)
Homebrew/homebrew-cask-versions#13382 (closed and opened Homebrew/homebrew-cask-versions#13390)

In some cases some PRs, even though are merge-ready, have been labeled stale.

So how I can I help?

[neutric]

@thecesrom Apart from increasing maintainer availability by becoming a maintainer, you can immediately improve the situation for everybody by putting less strain on the infrastructure. Not sure what the policy is for homebrew-cask-versions, but in homebrew-cask you'd be asked to dial down the frequency, especially if the casks in question auto-update.

Also, in the five months that I have been actively contribution again, these past handful(s) of days have been the only time where things progress a little slower. Just to put things into perspective.

[cesarcoatl]

Checking Homebrew/homebrew-cask-versions//CONTRIBUTING.md#nightly-builds-nightlies, there's the following recommendation:

use of a url do block in conjunction with version :latest and sha256 :no_check is encouraged

Although I was under the impression that both were discouraged.

I can say that azure-data-studio-insiders and visual-studio-code-insiders do have a Monday through Friday release schedule, which might qualify them as "nightly" or "daily". But using version :latest and sha256 :no_check will require the removal of livecheck and auto_updates, which might come with its own set of problems as brew upgrade will try to upgrade azure-data-studio-insiders even though it auto-updates.

Thoughts?

[bevanjkay]

@thecesrom brew upgrade would only upgrade the casks if the --greedy flag is passed. In the case of applications that are updated nightly, and have an auto-update mechanism, using version :latest would certainly reduce the maintenance overhead.

[cesarcoatl]

Homebrew/homebrew-cask-versions#13398 for azure-data-studio-insiders