Case study: Helping out Sylvain with PRs and Issues
I’ll be honest with you, as of today, watching Sylvain’s bug fixing commits, most of the time I have no idea what he’s doing. It’s all a voodoo stuff which one day I hope to be able to follow and code myself.
But I thought, perhaps, there are some things that he does in his handling of PRs and Issues that I could do instead of him to free up his time, so that he will have more time creating an even more amazing fastai library.
It didn’t take long to find. Perhaps, you don’t know that, but all contributions to the fastai projects require contributors to sign a Contributor License Agreement, and so, often, a new contributor, unaware of this requirement, submits a PR which we can’t accept until the CLA is signed. And usually you’d see the following at the bottom of a PR page:
And then Sylvain would comment:
Please sign this CLA agreement Voir anime Rick et Morty as explained here before we can proceed. Thank you.
And I said, I can do that too! And so can you. And so unless someone beats me to it, I just do it, it doesn’t save a great amount of time to Sylvain, but it all adds up and it also speeds up the submission to merging process, since the contributor might take some hours and sometimes days to comply (as often they have to ask permission from their employers).
Of course, typing that reply every time would be time wasteful, so github has reply templates. Unfortunately, they have to be configured manually by each github user and there is no way to have them pre-set per project. If you’d like to use our templates, it’s all documented here: https://github.com/fastai/fastai/blob/master/.github/issue_reply_templates.md
And once you configured them, here is how you use them. You just click on the right upper corner of the reply box and you get a dropdown with the pre-made replies. Then just pick the one you need, hit [Comment] and you’re done:
Even a total beginner in fastai can do that.
Among the reply templates I linked to above, you will find a few other templates that you can also use to help the maintainers:
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We don’t deal with install issues in the github Issues but have dedicated forum threads for that (since most issues have already been resolved and discussed in those threads, so the solution is most likely already there). so when someone posts an install question, we just reply with one of the following 2 replies and close the Issue.
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and then we have PRs from contributors who either haven’t read the steps for setting up the fastai repo or they forgot to do it, so when that happens the CI will report a
[fastai.fastai (nbstripout_config)]failure. In which case I reply with this template (as so can you):-
fastai: unstripped notebook
If your PR involves jupyter notebooks (
.ipynb) you must instrument your git tonbstripoutthe notebooks, as explained here. PRs with unstripped out notebooks cannot be accepted.
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So here you go, you now have at least 3 ways you can help the maintainers, PR contributors and Issue submitters w/o knowing much about fastai.
If you observe maintainers at work you will notice other little things that you could help with. Just watch the process and then see if you can save them time, by taking over some activities that you understand and feel comfortable at running with. Do not be afraid to make a mistake, it’ll all get sorted out if a mistake happens.
BTW, to save yourself time and not need to click around github a lot, you might want to sign up for email notifications for PRs and Issues in the github fastai projects so that you will get notified when new entries are submitted and you can also see a previews of PR/Issues in the notification emails. And also we have a commit diff mailing list if you prefer to watch diffs emails instead of using github: Notes For Developers – fastai