Triage Procedure

Pull Request Triage

Status Tags

  • S-waiting-on-author - Author needs to make changes to address reviewer comments, or merge conflicts/test failures are present. This also covers more obscure cases, like a PR being blocked on another (usually with the S-blocked label in addition), or waiting for a crater run – it is the author’s responsibility to push the PR forward.

    Also used for work-in-progress PRs, sometimes the PR will also be marked as draft in GitHub.

  • S-waiting-on-review - Review is incomplete

  • S-waiting-on-team - A T- label is marked, and team has been CC’d for feedback.

  • S-waiting-on-bors - Currently approved, waiting to merge. Managed by bors.

  • S-waiting-on-crater - Waiting to see what the impact the PR will have on the ecosystem

  • S-waiting-on-bikeshed - Waiting on the consensus over a minor detail

  • S-waiting-on-perf - Waiting on the results of a perf run

  • S-waiting-on-ACP - Waiting on API change proposal (ACP)

  • S-blocked - Waiting for another PR to be merged or for discussion to be resolved

  • S-inactive - Hasn’t had activity in a while

  • S-experimental - An experimental PR that shouldn’t be triaged. S-waiting-on-author used to be used for this, but S-experimental communicates that the PR is an experiment to test out some changes.

Also: PRs with no status tags. This is useful to find PRs where rustbot conked out and didn’t assign a reviewer and thus didn’t assign S-waiting-on-review. These PRs can get lost otherwise. (Note that you should likely not triage PRs that have r? @ghost since that means the author does not need a review yet.)

Procedure

We primarily triage three status labels: S-waiting-on-review, S-waiting-on-author, and (once in a while) S-blocked. Here is the procedure for each:

S-waiting-on-review

Click this link to see all PRs with the S-waiting-on-review label. Only triage PRs that were last updated 15 days or more ago (give or take a day).

For each PR:

  1. If the PR has new conflicts, CI failed, or a new review has been made then change the label to S-waiting-on-author and ping the author.

  2. Add the PR to your report.

S-waiting-on-author

Click this link to see all PRs with the S-waiting-on-author label. Only triage PRs that were last updated 15 days or more ago (give or take a day).

For each PR:

  1. If the author did what the PR was waiting on them for then update the label to S-waiting-on-review.

    Otherwise, if the author still needs to do something, then ping the author if they are not a member of a Rust team (does not include working groups — only teams like T-compiler, T-lang, T-rustdoc, etc.).

  2. Add the PR to your report.

S-blocked

You only need to check S-blocked PRs occasionally (e.g., once a month). Click this link to see all PRs with the S-blocked label.

For each PR:

  1. If it is still blocked then leave it as-is.

    Otherwise, if it is no longer blocked, then remove S-blocked (and add a status label like S-waiting-on-review if appropriate).

  2. Add the PR to your report.

Triage Report

You should record information about each PR you triage in a report. The report is just a small document that looks like:

S-waiting-on-review

#12345 20 days - still waiting on review - author: ferris, assignee: bors

[…]

Your report can look different, just make sure you include this information for each PR:

  1. The PR number (e.g., #12345). No need to manually add a link; the Rust Zulip will autolink PR (and issue) numbers.

  2. Number of days since last activity. “Activity” means:

    • author, reviewer, or team member commented or reviewed; or
    • bors commented about merge conflicts; or
    • PR was pushed to;
    • etc.

  3. Author, reviewer, and who or what (person, team, other PR, etc.) the PR is waiting on.

  4. Current status and what the most recent activity was (e.g., merge conflicts, reviewer commented).

Once you are done triaging PRs, post your report in the topic for the current week’s triage in the #t-release/triage Zulip stream. the topic should have a name like YYYY-MM-DD to YYYY-MM-DD. Note that this uses a monday-sunday week.

If a topic does not exist, you can generate its title with the following bash one-liner (requires GNU date):

echo "$(date -I --date="$([ "z$(date +%a)" = "zMon" ] && echo 'today' || echo 'last monday')") to $(date -I --date="$([ "z$(date +%a)" = "zSun" ] && echo 'today' || echo 'next sunday')")"

Avoiding duplicate work

Since triaging is sometimes done by looking at oldest issues first, re-applying one of the S-* labels will update an issue/PR’s last-modified timestamp, signaling to other triagers that it has already been taken care of.