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
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512
Hi,
On 7/8/19 10:04 AM, Isarra Yos wrote:
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 went ahead and +2'd it. As I was reviewing it, I was reminded of the "Merge Interwiki extension into MediaWiki core"[1] ticket that would be really nice to make some progress on as well.
[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T33951
- -- Legoktm
po 8. 7. 2019 v 16:05 odesÃlatel Isarra Yos zhorishna@gmail.com napsal:
How do you get patches merged when you don't actually know anyone to review it?
Hi,
my method is to add a few of people who +2'ed last patches on the extension/component I was working on and if that doesn't help, ping them on IRC to either merge or advise who I should ask. Direct messages are usually more efficient than global messages :-).
Martin
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
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On Sat, Jul 20, 2019 at 1:05 PM Martin Urbanec martin.urbanec@wikimedia.cz wrote:
my method is to add a few of people who +2'ed last patches on the extension/component I was working on and if that doesn't help, ping them on IRC to either merge or advise who I should ask.
I usually do that too when poking at an extension that doesn't have clear maintainers (and when people I usually work with don't seem appropriate reviewers). Plus I also tend to add the people who wrote the patches if they seem like they've been around for a while.
But in both cases I do that with the caveat that I try to ignore "global cleanup" commits. We have people who do valuable work in replacing deprecated code, fixing minor code style sniff errors, and so on that don't actually maintain all the code they touch in the process and I don't want to bombard them with spurious review requests.
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org