Balancing open PRs vs "Batteries Included"

@brettcannon wrote on python-dev thread Are “Batteries Included” still a Good Thing?

You’re right that is the fundamental problem. But for me this somewhat stems from the fact that we don’t have a shared understanding of what the stdlib is, and so the stdlib is a bit unbounded in its size and scope. That leads to a stdlib which is hard to maintain. It’s just like dealing with any scarce resource: you try to cut back on your overall use as best as you can and then become more efficient with what you must still consume; I personally think we don’t have an answer to the “must consume” part of that sentence that leads us to “cut back” to a size we can actually keep maintained so we don’t have 1.6K open PRs.

This piqued my curiosity, so I wrote a script to analyze the open PRs. Also in that thread, the CODEOWNERS file was brought up as a way of taking “ownership” of an area of interest/ownership within the stdlib. To that end, the results were mildly surprising.

  276 by core developers
   88 by triage team
   35 draft PRs
  844 matching CODEOWNERS
        42 from updated patterns
        15 only documentation
        419 without reviews
        187 without activity
  350 orphans
        121 only documentation
        230 without reviews
        124 without activity
------
 1593 open PRs

Note: the “updated patterns” ones are for lines in CODEOWNERS that don’t match what people assume (directories need a different pattern).

So it seems that the majority of open PRs are already covered by at least one core developer (or team). To me, this indicates that developer coverage of the stdlib isn’t causing the rising in open PRs, thus “Batteries Included” is not the factor. Modulo, of course, a core developer taking on too many areas of interest.

I greatly appreciate any feedback on the results, or if more detailed information would be included, I can update the data mining to include those results as well.

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Note: the “updated patterns” ones are for lines in CODEOWNERS that don’t match what people assume (directories need a different pattern).

Could you provide some concrete examples here, and maybe even a PR to fix the CODEOWNERS file?

For example:

# asyncio
**/*asyncio*                  @1st1 @asvetlov

only matches files that contain “asyncio” in the basename of the path. To match all files within Lib/asyncio the pattern **/*asyncio*/ needs to be specified as well. The Unix find command works well here for testing patterns:

find -name "*asyncio*" -type d

will show directories matching the pattern.

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I think that whole file needs a clean-up as I think some people got it wrong initially and now it’s propagated through the file.

Would you mind submitting a PR w/ your fixes?

I would definitely view CODEOWNERS as authoritative and instead more suggestive. So just because someone is listed as interested in an area does not mean they are still active or active enough to cover the volume of PRs they get requested to review.