Will your PR ever be Merged?

Hans Klunder What I want to achieve with my stats crunching (and merge-chance.info) is to help people find repos that are likely to accept their contributions. It is true that these (simple after all) stats won't take into account many cases, such as the one you mentioned - a contributor not knowledgeable enough - but I think it may still help tell an active and open project from a non-responsive and insider-focused one. Again, thanks for thinking along!

Piotr Zakrzewski the 5 merges rule is only on acceptance environment. The merge-chance.info version still runs the simple way of calculating stats.

Piotr Zakrzewski Thanks for clarifying this, that does indeed explain the 91.67%

The 5 merges rule sounds reasonable but without supporting evidence it could skew your results.

Once you got your first PR through then you know (and appearantly aligned with ;-)) the "culture" of the project (coding style, doc style etc, way of commenting). The project also gets to know you a bit ("that person from last PR") so you start to build trust. Both items will make it easier to get a second PR merged.

On the other hand: newbies with more ambition than skill will get their PR rejected and will never try again. Only the newbies with good enough skills and/or willingness to invest time will get their PR merged.

I have submitted to repo's where people asked me to rebase twice because they put their own PR's first. I got my PR merged, but it was not really a hospitable experience. Looking at the cold hard figures I got my PR merged, so it counts towards an increased chance of getting merged.

So although the figures are right (even the ones on Julia ;-)) I would not draw any conclusions on hospitality based on this data.

If you really want to know what your chances are on a succesful PR then my advice would be to get to know the project and raise an issue stating that you intent to submit a PR to do XYZ. If that issue goes stale or your intent is dismissed then you know enough ;-)

Personally I also prefer people to first submit an issue and discuss instead of starting stealth and suddenly submerge with a fully loaded PR that changes 75% of my project ;-)

And then some suggestions for other stats that could be useful:

• last time since merge (helps to find projects that most likely been abandoned)
• time between creation of issue/PR and first action (comment/triage/merge/close) (if this takes too long the project might be understaffed)
• total number of issues/PR's over time (is a project still mainstream or moving towards maintainance mode or worse)

Kind regards, Hans