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Ask HN: What do I do if a maintainer is ignoring my pull request?

1 points by aetherspawn ↗ HN
I have opened a pull request with pretty good Haskell code to a particular repo that addresses an open issue by another user, but the maintainer has now been ignoring me for 8 days whilst committing to master and answering other people.

I tried tagging him, asking for feedback, asking whether the direction is OK, etc but not even a single response.

The code is about 2000 lines of definitions and took about 3 evenings (>25 hrs) to write. What should I do in this situation?

4 comments

[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 19.5 ms ] thread
LiamPa
Split it up, someone made a PR like this to one of my libraries once and even looking at it scared me.
johncoltrane
If we are talking FOSS-project-with-a-single-maintainer there's no reason whatsoever to expect _anything_ from the maintainer.

He may be on vacation. Or ill. Or busy doing other things. Or unable to dedicate 3 evenings to review your 2000 lines of code _right now_. He will eventually get back to you but until then it will certainly be a good idea to split your PR in several self-contained PRs, as suggested by LiamPa.

In the mean time, get in touch with the user who had the original issue and figure out together if your change actually fixes it without causing regression. This will certainly help the maintainer.

aetherspawn
There are some other PRs in a similar situation that have been ignored for months.

I just wish the maintainer would answer. Then I would know that it’s more worth my while to do a hard fork than waste my time checking the thread every day.

The issue is a feature request, and it is mainly resolved by just self contained boilerplate API modules. The user posted the feature request >6 mo ago and I don’t really know where they have gone, but I needed the same feature.

brudgers
The maintainer does not owe anyone attention. Strangers demanding attention is sometimes a reason maintainers burnout and abandon projects.

If it really matters, fork the project and take responsibility for moving it in the direction you think it should go and run it the way you think it ought to be run.

Good luck.