Description
It might be useful to document how contributors can work on issues that are either labeled "help wanted" and unassigned, assigned to someone but stalled, and in general stalled PRs.
For instance, we often have "help wanted" issues where people ask if they can work on them, often if would be a new contributor. Then a maintainer would say, "yes please", but in my estimation in ~50% of cases no contribution would come out of it. Then this issue is "stalled" until someone else asks if they can take the issue (cf e.g. #12971 (comment)).
There were also other earlier cases, with two new contributors reaching an agreement on who would take the issue only to have a third new contributor make the PR.
It might be good to standardize this workflow somewhere in the docs. For instance,
- To determine if an issue is taken it is necessary to,
- check the conversation to see if someone said they are working on it
- check for existence of linked PRs
-
When a contributor comments on a issue to say they are working on it, a PR is expected within 2 weeks (new contributor) or 4 weeks (contributor or core dev), unless an larger time frame is explicitly given. Beyond that time, another contributor can take the issue without asking for permission and make a PR for it.
-
PRs that have a requested change and no response from the author for 1 month are considered stale. For stale PRs, another contributor may ask if the author plans to work on it, and if no response is given within 2 weeks make a new PR to continue the work.
I realize this does not address all case, and delays could be adjusted but I feel something like this in the docs might be useful so we could reference to it if needed.
Maybe there is an issue about this but I can find it.