5 ms·
Show HN: Check if a GitHub repo is open to contributions
- mtlynch 6y agoCool project! I've long wanted something like that but it's hard to find the right metrics. When I'm contributing to a project, the thing I care most about is response time. If I submit a PR and the maintainer accepts it a year later, that's not very inviting. But if the maintainer gets back to me in a day and explains why they're rejecting my PR, that's actually a much better outcome. I tried plugging in my own project (mtlynch/tinypilot), and I score a disappointing 60%. But I think what happens is that external contributors often aren't very familiar with git, so they'll try to fix merge conflicts by merging instead of rebasing, leading to PRs that are 10x larger due to merge noise. In those cases, I cherry pick their commits into a new PR, but I'm guessing that counts as a rejected PR, even though their commits are getting merged in.
- gieksosz 6y agoI am working on adding more metrics, like stale PRs. Maybe I will incorporate response time if it is feasible. Thanks for feedback!
- gieksosz 6y agoAuthor here! This is a small web app written in Python Flask and deployed on Cloud Run. It extracts data from GitHub via their GraphQL API and caches it in Firestore (just because it is way cheaper for a low traffic side project than running Redis).
- timvdalen 6y agoLooks cool! One feature recommendation: you might want to consider supporting people submitting the entire URL. Currently, when you do that, you hit a 500.
- kraenhansen 6y agoI think this is a great idea! I can definitely see the use of it as a maintainer of an open source project.
- gieksosz 6y agoThanks! I am also thinking about adding percentage of stale PRs and/or median time to get merged.
- kaedroho 6y agoDoes this account for projects that merge commits outside of the GitHub interface? NodeJS use a bot that manually merges the commits but closes the PRs: https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/36661 https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/36661
- gieksosz 6y agoSadly I cannot account for this .. In theory I could check if the commits/or just head commit from PR founds its way into the main/master tree. But for now it just checks the status of the PR.
- kevinjahns 6y agoMy projects get a very discouraging rate of ~60%. That is probably because I reject a lot of PRs created by bots (dependabot, security fixes if they are only to dev dependencies). Maybe because I merge commits manually. I remember rejecting only a few PRs. It seems very discouraging for new contributors.
- gieksosz 6y agoHmm maybe I could find a way to exclude bot made PRs from the stats. Thanks for your feedback!