Rotting patches [was: Re: Reviewed-By: and pastebins]

[Andre Klapper <ak-47 gmx net>]

On Thu, 2012-05-03 at 12:00 -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
> One of my goals for 2012 is to increase the number of patches I'm
> reviewing myself, and more generally, even further increase the
> percentage of patches that go into GNOME that have peer review.

Offtopic, but the obvious first step would be to improve the rate of
reviewed patches in general.

While peer reviews are great, **in some projects** teams miss manpower
already to have reviews at all, without any peer.
(And if you are a first-time contributor and you never receive feedback
on your first patch you give up and won't know where to escalate. That's
where GNOME's contributor base remains small.)

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/browse.cgi?product=FOO provides a link at the
right to the list of unreviewed patches for the project FOO.
Two examples:
* gtk+: 637 unreviewed patches; 480 of them older than 12 months
* gnome-shell: 125 unreviewed; 61 of them older than 6 months

I wonder if anybody has ideas how (and time) to clean up, e.g. by
setting "needs-rework" or simply rejecting unwanted fixes. Or agreeing
in a team to have maximum XX unreviewed patches by 3.6.0 or so.

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/patchsquad-list/ was one idea but never
took off and has been dead as hell for years.

andre
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