Proposal for a new process to submit PRs

[ocelotl]

I would like to suggest a specific approach:

1. Anyone can open an issue.
2. Any PR must have an assigned issue, the author of the PR must be assigned to the issue.
3. Any other PR gets closed automatically with a message that says "you need to get assigned to this issue first".

This forces PR authors to contact maintainers (via Slack or by attending the SIG) to ask for an issue to be assigned to them. This also gives maintainers an opportunity to discuss the issue first before accepting it as a valid issue and assigning someone to work on this issue.

Originally posted by @ocelotl in #5343

[ocelotl]

This topic branched off #5343, opening a new issue here.

[ocelotl]

Proposal: require an assigned issue for every PR

I'd like to propose the following process for how issues and pull requests flow together in this repository:

1. Anyone can open an issue. When you do, please explain what you'd like to see addressed. This gives maintainers, approvers, and the rest of the community a chance to discuss it and reach consensus on whether it's something we want to do, and how.
2. Once an issue is considered valid, an Approver or Maintainer assigns it to whoever is going to implement the corresponding PR. If you'd like to work on an issue, say so in the issue itself, or reach out on Slack or during the Python SIG meeting, and a maintainer will assign it to you.
3. Every PR must reference the issue it addresses, and its author must be the assignee of that issue. PRs opened without a referenced issue, or whose author isn't assigned to it, would be closed automatically with a comment explaining why.

Why

This isn't about discouraging contributions or adding red tape — everyone is still very welcome to open issues and work on them. It's a response to the volume of PRs now being generated with the help of AI coding tools, which has grown to the point where it's hard for our relatively small group of maintainers and approvers to review everything with the attention it deserves. Requiring consensus on an issue before any code is written lets us spend our limited review time on changes the community has already agreed are worth making, rather than triaging finished PRs for ideas we may not want at all.

Draft PRs are still welcome

If writing some code helps you illustrate what you have in mind, feel free to open a draft PR and link it from the issue discussion, even before the issue is assigned — it's a good way to make a proposal concrete while it's still being discussed. Once the issue reaches consensus and is assigned, the PR can be marked ready for review.

Automating enforcement

The "must reference an assigned issue" check is automatable: GitHub's closingIssuesReferences API tells us which issue(s) a PR is linked to (via Fixes #N in the description or manual linking), and we can cross-check the PR author against that issue's assignee list. A workflow could run on PR open/edit/sync and auto-close (with an explanatory comment) any PR that doesn't satisfy both conditions, exempting drafts until they're marked ready for review.

[ocelotl]

@open-telemetry/python-maintainers please assign this issue to me

[herin049]

Personally, I'm in favor of these change. I don't think it's too much to ask to have contributors leave a comment under issues that they would like to be assigned to.

In the SIG you mentioned that you found another repo that roughly follows this approach. Do you mind including a link to the repo in the issue for additional context?

[ocelotl]

In the SIG you mentioned that you found another repo that roughly follows this approach. Do you mind including a link to the repo in the issue for additional context?

Sure, here it is.