GoKawiilA year per PR #
I have been trying to get a feature into Jellyfin web for over a year. Opened three PRs, even got two approvals, but zero merges. The feature is relatively isolated and small. When you are adjusting subtitle offset in the player, it adds a timeline that shows you exactly which subtitle will appear when, so you can see what you are doing instead of guessing.
A reviewer gave detailed feedback on the first day. I split the work into smaller pieces when they asked, responded same day, changed the code style to match the project. The refactor PR got two approvals and is just sitting there. The smallest PR, 49 lines added, 0 deleted, has never gotten a single human review.
I brought this up in the Jellyfin community and someone joked that a year is not even that long for Jellyfin PRs. The main maintainer said the backlog “sucks… for everyone” and that every second he is not reviewing makes it worse. I asked if PR size limits, proposal requirements, different processes could help. The answer was mostly “there is only one maintainer.”
I think there is more to it than that.
A common problem #
This is not unusual, most popular open source projects have the same problem.
open PRs across projects it is not just jellyfin CPython ~30 core devs 2,200 github Jellyfin Web ~1 active reviewer 200 github Angular Google team 118 github Vue.js ~3 full-time 114 github
CPython has over 2,200 open PRs. At the 2022 Python Language Summit, a core developer presented on the backlog specifically and pointed out a chicken-and-egg problem: no active reviewer for a module means no reviews, which means no new reviewers get trained.
Evan You, the creator of Vue.js, has talked openly about how the volume of issues became impossible to keep up with as the project grew. A 2024 Tidelift survey found that 60% of open source maintainers have quit or considered quitting. A Ford Foundation report found that the vast majority of open source projects are maintained by one or two people.
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