On Sat, Mar 16, 2019 at 5:37 PM Thomas Eugene Bishop < thomasbishop@wenlin.com> wrote:
A bug fix was provided years ago but never accepted or rejected. It’s the first and last MediaWiki bug ever assigned to me. I’ve just unassigned myself.
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T149639https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T... In cases like this, remarks like “Because you did not fix these bugs” and “... anyone is free to pick it up and work on it ... No further response needed” miss the point. When a bug fix is provided, but nobody with authority to accept or reject it ever does so, that’s a failure on the part of those who have authority, not on the part of those who are able and willing to fix bugs. Sure, volunteers are “free” to waste their time!
The code review backlog is a genuine problem (I'd say it's in the top 3 problems we have, along with lack of good documentation, and well-structured testable code). It's entirely unrelated to the task backlog and the other topics in this thread, though. There has been plenty of discussion on it and various attempts at addressing (you can see some in T78768 [1], or in various Wikimedia Developer Summit sessions such as T149639 [2]). Unfortunately without much result so far, but the problem is definitely no lack of awareness. (I'd argue that lack of organizational focus / commitment *is* a problem, so making your voice heard in the various planning processes would be helpful. wikitech-l is not a great place for that, though.)
You need to use and share your authority more effectively, to “be bold”
with accepting and rejecting bug fixes. Authorize more people to accept or reject bug fixes. Assign each proposed bug fix to one such person, starting with the oldest bugs. Then hold those people accountable. You don’t lack volunteers, you lack volunteers with authority.
Being able to accept bug fixes effectively means being able to deploy code to Wikimedia production, which has security and robustness implications. So there are some limits on how widely we can distribute that authority. That said, we are probably more conservative than we should be, and nominating new reviewers [3] is one of the more useful things one could do.
[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T78768 [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T149639 [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Gerrit/Privilege_policy#Requesting_Gerrit_pri...