Dealing with the ever growing number of issues and pull requests to this project

[ravishi]

Right now there are 975 issues and 35 pull requests in this repo.

It must be impossible to resolve all the issues and review all the pull requests at the same time. This is probably a issue with the development model of YoutubeDL. Everything has to be merged into the main repo, which makes it impossible to deal with the ever growing number of requests for new sites and fixes over older ones. The better the software will get, the harder it'll be to maintain it under such model.

I have proposed before [1] a model in which people would be able to develop and maintain youtube-dl extractors within their own packages and they would be discovered through a standard Python plugin system. It's very bare and don't cover some things like Windows or bundled executable (which, I suppose, is the main form of distribution of YoutubeDL). Still, I'm pretty sure these issues could also be solved if we put some effor into it.

The problem is, that pull request is still buried in the "PR hell" and haven't received any attention for over an year and a half, even though it seemed to have some approval when I first submitted it [2].

Can't we discuss that? I guess I could help with the implementation once we agree on the model.

[1] #1198
[2] I consider this discussion some sort of approval: #1185

[phihag]

I'm sorry, we should have come to your pull request sooner. You can just comment on a PR or open a new issue; either one should be enough to get our attention.

I'd like to straighten out the view of PR hell. The reason that we have so many open PRs is not that we are unable to accept them. All of the currently open PRs are open either because there are nontrivial deficits in the code, or their inclusion is questionable.

Note that new extractors are usually accepted within days, if not hours, and the same goes for bugfixes to existing extractors, especially if the author of the PR also wrote the extractor. Therefore, I do not think that extractors accept rates are a bottleneck.

I'll try to be more vigilant about declining PRs, and pointing out what has to be changed for the rest of them. Thank you for the note!