Give attention to and triage in our pull request list

[consideRatio]

We have many PRs that have gone stale, to a large degree because we've had a low capacity to review them. This is a bit problematic in itself as its not a fun experience for anyone involved.

Currently, resolving this would unblock #1381 which is deemed to cause too much disruption on currently open PRs to be worth merging at this point. But I'm most interested in getting to a state where we have a healthy state and concrete action plan for all PRs rather than unblocking #1381 which can wait.

How do we address this?

[betatim]

I think the action to take to reduce the PR backlog is simple and hard at the same time: start reviewing PRs and making decisions on merge vs close. It is simple because "start reviewing" is only two words, it is hard because reviewing PRs is hard work.

AFAIK the disruption from #1381 would be merge conflicts. So another way to deal with that (for example for PRs that we want to land but will take a while or need discussion before a decision can be made) is to provide an instruction on how to run the tools on the branch of a PR. I think it should be possible to resolve conflicts by accepting the PR branch's changes when there is a conflict, running the reformatting tools, making a new commit with the formatting changes. My thinking is that the places where there are conflicts are because on master there are formatting changes and in the PR's branch the logic changed. So accepting the PR branch's change makes sense, then reformatting to get it consistent.

More experienced users might be able to do clever things with rebasing their PRs branch onto the latest master. But I am not sure I'd want to provide support to PR authors who don't go down this route themselves. This means unless we have a bullet proof recipe, I'd not suggest this.