How do you get patches merged when you don't actually know anyone to review it?
Sometimes you just get lucky, but sometimes you add a bunch of people, a few others even wander in and +1 it, you ask a few people with core +2 to take a look, and then you're still waiting on a product owner to maybe even comment at all and you can't get anyone to actually merge it months later.
The patch I'm referring to right now is this: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/Interwiki/+/501820
It adds another global inheritance feature, this time for interlanguage links, where they can just be set once on a single wiki and other wikis in the farm can likewise just use those instead of local ones. Separate setting from the global interwikis because ones that would share this will be a smaller subset than would share general interwikis.
Normally we'd just merge each other's patches in-team or go get an actual product owner to review it, but there are a couple of problems with this:
* The patch was co-authored by Jack Phoenix and me (and I defined the design in the first place), so neither of us can meaningfully review it any further than we already have. No one else has +2 here. * We don't know any product owners (in fact we're not even sure if there are any product owners), so we can't get them to review it. Given the total lack of comment, normally we might just declare this as 'nobody cares' after awhile and charge ahead regardless, but: * Nobody else we know with general +2 is willing to merge it without weigh-in from the product owners/actually has any time to review it in the first place, either.
Basically, uh, can anyone else help us with this? Any of this? Given the nature of the patch we really do kind of need it merged so it can get translations.
-I