2011/2/13 Bryan Tong Minh <bryan.tongminh(a)gmail.com>om>:
This has gotten better lately, WMF created a
bugmeister position and
the bugmeister tries to respond to most if not all bugs after being
reported. We should definitely keep up with this and try to at least
confirm every problem that is being reported.
The difficult part I think is responding to every patch. I don't
believe that we currently have the capacity to review those patches.
(In fact we barely have sufficient capacity to review the
contributions of our core developers!)
I've also read one of the articles linked in the OP, and it got me
thinking about the fact that we're not only bad at responding to bug
reports (although bugmeister efforts are focused on that now), but
also at responding to commits. In the preparations for the 1.17
release I've seen lots of commits that were several months old and
only got reviewed because we decided to work on a release. Ideally,
every commit would be reviewed within a few days of being committed,
so the committer can still reasonably be expected to fix any issues
with it. Not letting review get too far behind HEAD is also important
for doing continuous integration, something I'm really gonna push for
now that I'm closely involved with the saga around deploying a new
version with about 15,000 new revisions.
Getting things reviewed fast ought to be doable if we set up some kind
of schedule where, say, 7 reviewers are each responsible for one day
of the week (or 5 reviewers for 4 36-hour chunks and one 24-hour
chunk, or take turns every 100 revisions, or ...) and reassign some of
their revisions to others where specific expertise is needed. This is
basically what we've been doing with the last 1.17 review sprint: Mark
Hershberger divided up the review queue between 4 or 5 people using
tags in CodeReview, and we would each go through our queue, review
what we could, and reassign the rest.
Bugzilla patches are another matter, yes, but I think making sure
patches get reviewed can be a Bugmeister task. We get relatively few
patches through Bugzilla these days anyway.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)