Strategies for Advancing Pull Requests: Engaging Committers and Seeking Community Support

If you are unsure about some change requests, please ask reviewers *why* they requested them. This will usually reveal how important they deem it to be and will help educate you about standards, best practices, unwritten rules as well as preferences people have and why. Some committers have stronger opinions on some things and may not want to merge your PR if you don't follow their requests. It is totally fine to get yourself a second or third opinion in such a case. ### Committers work on a push-basis It's possible for you to get a review but nothing happens afterwards, even if you respond to review comments. A committer not following up on your PR does not necessarily mean they're disinterested, they may have simply had other circumstances preventing them from doing so. Committers typically handle many PRs at the same time and it is not realistic for them to keep up with all of them immediately. If someone approved and didn't merge a few days later, they most likely just forgot. Please see it as your responsibility to actively remind reviewers of your open PRs. The easiest way to do so is to notify them via GitHub. Github notifies people involved, whenever you add a comment or push to your PR or re-request their review. Doing any of that will get their attention again. Everyone deserves proper attention, and yes, that includes you! However, please be mindful that committers can sadly not always give everyone the attention they deserve. It may very well be the case that you have to do this every time you need the committer to follow up upon your PR. Again, this is a community project so please be mindful of people's circumstances here; be nice when requesting reviews again. It may also be the case that the committer has lost interest or isn't familiar enough with the component you're touching to be comfortable to merge. They will likely not immediately state that fact, so please ask for clarification and don't hesitate to find yourself another committer to take a look. ### Nothing helped If you followed these guidelines but still got no results or if you feel that you have been wronged, please explicitly reach out to the greater community. The [NixOS Discourse](https://discourse.nixos.org) is a great place to do this, as it has historically been the asynchronous medium with the greatest concentration of committers and other people who are involved in Nixpkgs. There is a dedicated discourse thread [PRs in distress](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/prs-in-distress/3604) where you can link your PR, if everything else fails. The [Nixpkgs / NixOS contributions Matrix channel](https://matrix.to/#/#dev:nixos.org) is the best synchronous channel with the same qualities. Please reserve these for cases where you've made a serious effort in trying to get the attention of multiple active committers and provided realistic means for them to assess your PR's quality. As mentioned previously, it is unfortunately perfectly normal for a PR to sit around for weeks. Please don't blow up situations where progress is happening but is merely not going fast enough for your tastes. Honking in a traffic jam will not make you go any faster.

This document offers strategies for navigating stalled pull request (PR) progress. Authors are advised to ask reviewers 'why' changes are requested for understanding. If a committer holds strong opinions, seeking a second or third opinion is encouraged. Committers operate on a 'push-basis,' so authors must actively remind them about open PRs, usually via GitHub. Politeness and patience are key, as committers handle many PRs and may be delayed. If a committer loses interest or lacks expertise, authors should find another. If individual efforts fail, escalate the PR to the broader community via NixOS Discourse ('PRs in distress' thread) or Matrix, but only for genuine stalls after serious effort, not impatience.