On Sat, Mar 16, 2019 at 5:37 PM Thomas Eugene Bishop <
thomasbishop(a)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/…
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_pr…