How to improve community-contributed PR velocity

[wesharper]

I'm extremely appreciative of the Meilisearch team and its commitment to its open source repositories. There is a massive amount of great work that has been done and I don't in any way want this feedback to come across as critical of the team or its contributions. Open source work is a privilege to be able to use, and I'm very grateful to any of the core contributors to this service, which has done wonders for my own team.

I have been tracking some great new PRs to the ruby and Rails SDKs/client libraries and have noticed that the review velocity for some of the work there has been slow. Some old PRs have been stale for some time. I really hate to directly ping core contributors to ask for reviews, but at the same time, I'm sure the team doesn't want its client SDKs getting too far out of sync with the core feature set.

• What is the best way for community members to help maintain and update client libraries in their domain without spamming the core maintenance team?
• Is there a vetting process for community members becoming PR approvers? Can we recruit some valued community members who meet some set of criteria?
• Are there intended and well-known CODEOWNERS for every repo that the community can ping when needed?

[wesharper]

@ellnix do you have any thoughts?

[wesharper]

I am operating under the assumption that community maintainers are not able to approve the work of other community members and merge when all existing criteria are met. If my assumption is incorrect, and a final stamp of approval by a full-time employee of the Meilisearch dev team is not strictly required, then the PR velocity of any given repo is wholly dictated by the level of sufficient community support and we can shift the focus of this discussion to something like: "How do we improve community-driven contributions in tier 2 and 3 repos?"

[ellnix]

I can approve contributions from any users, there is no review requirement from a member of the meili team.

[wesharper]

Ah yeah, my operating assumptions were all off. Extra apologies for that.

[wesharper]

Time to beef up the Meilisearch Ruby community! @ellnix, let me know if there are any low-hanging fruit I can contribute to.

[ellnix]

I would recommend low hanging fruit and also doing code reviews on other PRs, even though you don't have any privileges yet. Code review is proven to be very effective at catching bugs and bringing new devs up to speed on a repo.

Low hanging fruit on ms-ruby could be meilisearch/meilisearch-ruby#602 it was stuck in limbo while I was waiting for feedback on if it would be the right thing to do, but just today Strift was broadly in favor of it. If you are interested we can discuss collaborating on it.

I'll keep an eye out for ms-rails tasks to forward to you, but that repo is a bit of a mess right now and I need to get my head around it properly.

If you say you are interested in code review, I will make a habit of tagging you in PRs.