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

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

On Thu, 2012-05-03 at 19:14 +0200, Andre Klapper wrote:

> While peer reviews are great, **in some projects** teams miss manpower
> already to have reviews at all, without any peer.

If one doesn't have any peers for a particular project, yes, clearly
there's no one to review.  However we should be able to do significantly
better than we are at building out the peering relationships between
individual components.

> (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

That does seem very high, but note some of these *have* been reviewed,
and both the reporter and reviewer agree there's a needs-work state.

> I wonder if anybody has ideas how (and time) to clean up, e.g. by
> setting "needs-rework"

Right; offhand my guess is that's the effective state for at least
30-40% of these.

>  Or agreeing
> in a team to have maximum XX unreviewed patches by 3.6.0 or so.

It's going to be a continual process I think; setting hard targets
might help.  Just talking about it will help too as we are now =)

FWIW, I marked some gnome-shell needs-work/rejected patches as such so
something happened besides words...