PRs policy

[Raul-Sebastian Mihăilă]

A month ago I opened a github issue (
https://github.com/tc39/ecma262/issues/1061) in which I asked whether or
not TC39 should have a policy WRT the time frame in which a PR should be
merged. I mentioned that there was currently an open PR (
https://github.com/tc39/ecma262/pull/666) which had consensus, for a
confirmed bug that was reported one year and a half ago.

It's obviously not always possible to set expectations WRT to time. It's
possible that at some point a difficult to understand or
difficult/impossible to fix bug is found. However, in this case, the PR
already achieved consensus in TC39.

A year ago I held a course about the Javascript object model, invariants
and internal methods. I mentioned the existing bugs related to proxies. I
mentioned that there was a PR that would soon be merged and since not many
people were using proxies at that time, the bugs weren't a serious concern.
One year later, the PR is still not merged.

This thread isn't about good or bad, although we can think about
expectations people might have. For instance, in general, when somebody
works on something, if that thing isn't working properly, it is expected
that that somebody would fix that issue. Also, as we know, in Javascript
the older a bug is, the greater the risk that somebody will start depending
on the bad behavior, which can make it more difficult to fix the bug. It's
also important to mention that, as we all know, TC39 did a great job
improving the spec over time.

This thread is about whether or not people can have some expectations WRT
the time frame in which a bug is fixed. I believe it's easier to set
expectations WRT PRs that already have consensus and I believe that in this
case one year and a half is a rather long period. It would be nice if the
community could have some sort of expectations in the simpler cases.

In that github issue I was told that the PR needed tests (which was already
obvious) and I was suggested to contribute the tests if I wanted to push
the feature forward. An important aspect of this story is that the initial
bug that triggered the whole discussion about these issues was found by
myself, a volunteer (
https://esdiscuss.org/topic/object-freezing-proxies-should-freeze-or-throw).
The other issues were found and the fixes in the PR for the proxies
internal methods were done by Claude Pache, which as far as I'm aware also
did this voluntary (see the PR link above). The way I see it, most of the
work that was done to push this feature forward was already done by
volunteers that are not part of TC39. I personally am busy with other work
and stuff that don't allow me to do the testing for this PR.

Therefore:
1) Should TC39 have a policy WRT the time frame in which a PR should be
merged?
2) Does a year and a half look like a long period for a PR with consensus
that hasn't been merged?
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