• @FooBarrington
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    1 month ago

    While I have no stance on the meme, I’d like to point out that just looking at raw numbers isn’t a sufficient counter argument for multiple reasons:

    • Many projects use PRs to merge feature branches from maintainers, while outside PRs are left lying around
    • I’ve seen people close their PRs in other projects after sitting around for a long time. How many of those 19,074 were withdrawn?
    • The Mastodon repo used to have the stale bot enabled (might still be), e.g. in this random example. How many of those 19,074 were automatically closed?
    • They also use the renovate bot. How many of those 19,074 were automatically submitted?

    I actually went through and checked how many PRs were automatically submitted, we have:

    • dependabot-preview: 1,107
    • dependabot: 2,279
    • renovate: 1,126
    • github-actions: 270

    There might be more that I’ve missed (e.g. dependabot-preview isn’t listed as an app in the authors filter), but this adds up to 4,782 PRs, just over a quarter of total PRs. That’s a rather large deviation.

    Again, not saying that you’re incorrect, but the numbers you mention could also occur in a project that is as bad as the meme describes.