During PR triage today, it seems like we closed or considered closing a number of PRs purely due to lack of review and interest in reviewing, not due to any problems with the PRs themselves.
I think it’s reasonable to close PRs like these, because we have a severe lack of reviewer bandwidth, so having lots of low priority PRs open can make it harder for higher priority PRs to receive the attention they deserve.
However, I think it would be good to distinguish between PRs that are good but closed because they provide relatively minor benefits, and PRs that were closed because they have problems or need more work.
Suggestion: I want to suggest closing these PRs with an “Insufficient review” tag and message like “This PR has not attracted enough review while it’s been open, and is being closed to focus limited reviewer attention on PRs that seem like a higher priority to other project contributors. If there is more interest in reviewing this, it can be reopened.”
I think an “Insufficient review” tag would be useful to know at a glance which closed PRs seem like good changes and don’t have known problems, and to be able to quantify how many potentially good PRs are getting left behind due to review shortage. I also think if the closing message describes the problem as a review shortage, not a problem with the PR itself, it might be less discouraging to contributors, especially new contributors. And it might even encourage more review.
For reference, the current closing message for these PRs is “The PR didn’t seem to attract much attention in the past. Also, the issue seems not important enough right now to keep it sitting around idle in the list of open PRs. Closing due to lack of interest.”
