The Seven-Year Commute to Merge a Pull Request

Description

A screenshot of a GitHub conversation on a pull request. The top comment from repository owner 'gkoberger' on March 19, 2013, reads: 'Okay this is awesome. I'll test it out and merge when I get home. Thanks!'. Below this are two commit messages from the contributor 'kofalt': 'Javascript is hard' and 'Forgot a global'. The punchline is the final comment from user 'v1993' on December 17, 2020, almost eight years later, which asks: 'Sorry for rushing this a bit, but got home yet?'. The humor lies in the massive time gap between the promise to merge the PR and the follow-up, highlighting the phenomenon of abandoned or long-forgotten pull requests in open-source projects. It's a relatable scenario for any developer who has contributed to or maintained a project, where life and other priorities get in the way

Common Tags

PullRequest Git Github DeveloperHumor CodeReviewPainPoints CodeReviewHorrorStories DeveloperFrustration VersionControl DeveloperProcrastination DeadlinePressure

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick Some PRs are like a TCP connection with a massive retransmission timeout; you send the SYN, get the SYN-ACK, and then wait seven years for the final ACK to establish the merge

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

Some PRs are like a TCP connection with a massive retransmission timeout; you send the SYN, get the SYN-ACK, and then wait seven years for the final ACK to establish the merge
Anonymous

Seven-year-old PR: at this point “merge when I get home” needs a master→main rename, three LTS bumps, and a paleontologist to resolve the merge conflicts
Anonymous

This PR has been in review longer than most startups survive. At this point, the original JavaScript framework it was written for has been deprecated, rewritten in TypeScript, abandoned for a new paradigm, and is now making a nostalgic comeback as 'classic mode'
Anonymous

This PR perfectly captures the open source maintainer experience: enthusiastically approving a contribution with genuine intent to merge 'when I get home,' only to have a contributor politely check in seven years later asking if you've made it back yet. It's the software equivalent of saying 'let's grab coffee sometime' and someone actually following up. The commit messages 'Javascript is hard' and 'Forgot a global' are just chef's kiss - we've all been there, debugging scope issues at 2 AM. The real tragedy? Those 154 laugh reactions suggest this resonated with an entire generation of maintainers who have their own graveyard of 'will merge tomorrow' PRs from 2013
Anonymous

2013: “I’ll test and merge when I get home.” 2020: “Home yet?” Turns out our CI had a single point of failure and we forgot a global: commute_time
Anonymous

Turns out “I’ll merge when I get home” was a DNS CNAME to Glacier Deep Archive - DORA lead time measured in presidential administrations
Anonymous

Fixed the global leak, but the merge promise is still hoisted in eternal limbo
@dosboxd 5y

oof 🗣
1. @x_Arthur_x 5y
  
  r/ihavereddit
@PatiHox 5y

me in a nutshell :/