I actually like it. If "Evil approval bot" mailed you warning that it will merge 12 pending changesets in two days if there's no action from your part, that would force some promptly action by you.
Not a chance in hell we'll ever allow this for the operations repo or the mediawiki deployment branches.
I recently had a trivial patch to operations/puppet waiting for more than a month. When I noticed I hadn't added any Reviewer, and added to it, the changeset was fixed in the same day. But that also shows that nobody looked for new changes there.
That's because ops tends to be swamped with requests constantly. We work mostly on an interruption model. I doubt we'll change our workflow any time soon to check for changes that haven't asked for a review.
I have also seen people approving their own commits to core, something I'm not comfortable with.
I dislike this, very much. The workflow in ops requires this, but there's no reason it should happen in mediawiki core.
I was also recently unhappy when I discovered that one patch I thought I had open, had been abandoned without explanation. There can be good reasons for doing that, this is a bad idea, no longer needed, fixed in a different way in I123456... or even "closing because it has been waiting for a new patch for too long and I don't like seeing this open" (which I suspect was the case), but *please*, if you're closing another people's patch, leave an explanation!
Indeed. Like bugs, something should never be dropped without saying why.
- Ryan