I hope someone can explain the sentiment on HN to me. I don't get it, why is this popular?
I want to know how many PRs a project is getting, but more than that how receptive the maintainers are. Issues don't tell the whole picture, because work gets backlogged, and you can't expect people doing this for free to have an SLA or something. but PRs.. the work is ideally at least mostly done.
There is the one project for example, very popular in the industry it's used in. There is a specific use-case that I run into repeatedly, that it fails at. The project has lots of open issues (understandably), and there are multiple PRs to address that, but the maintainers give no good reason for not accepting it. I've been using some random guy's branch (who isn't even keeping up with the latest releases and backporting) for many years now, waiting for the maintainers to either reject it or accept the PR. Lots of people upvote, comment, and beg.
I want to see how maintainers handle that. This is really bad. I'd prefer if they stopped reporting of issues instead of PRs. Issues is providing support, PRs let other people who fixed something or added a feature attempt to contribute.
You can't just "fork it", that means you have to be the maintainer now. And how will people even find your "fork" which may have fixed things? I'd like to be able to at least find open and unmerged forks with a fix in place I could apply, even if the maintainer never got around to it.
Turning PRs off is the software equivalent of hardware makers turning off support for aftermarket parts.
Honestly, if you don't like PRs, ignore them like many already do. Does it look bad when you do that? Yes. As it should! Don't hide away from your preferences, own it. Let other people get access to fixes you either have no time to get to, or unwilling to implement.
Just the discussions alone on security related issues (or PRs as in this case) is telling sometimes.