As I wrote in the last blog post, we try try to open YaST development as much as possible. When I thought what is the most annoying thing for me when contributing to an open source project, then it is when my contribution is ignored. So if I send a patch and do not get any response or I get response, but my patch is not merged without any reason, then I do not contribute again as I see it as a waste of time. To prevent such situation in YaST I’ve created an automatic reminder of pending pull requests for the YaST repos at GitHub.

How it is done? I want to have it transparent, reusable and automatic. The core component is a small ruby script I wrote to fetch pending requests for an organization on GitHub. It uses the GitHub API and tries to find any pull request without activity for three working days.

This script is handled by our public Jenkins server where it pulls the latest version of the script every working day and if there is any pending pull request it will send an email with its result to the YaST mailing list.

After a month of sending emails we have handled all longer running pull requests we have for YaST, so none of them have gone without activity longer than a month. I hope it encourages developers to create more pull requests as they will not be forgotten. We plan also to deploy such reminder for the libyui organization.