On Wed, Apr 09, 2014 at 08:08:01AM -0700, Quim Gil wrote:
I just learned that OpenStack has a policy to abandon automatically reviews sitting in -1 during more than one week:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63533#c1
Maybe one week is too tight for the reality of our project, but what about 2-4 weeks?
As probably one of the worst offenders, I'm not a fan.
I've written and subsequently left patchsets to sit for many months - possibly over a year in some cases - but I don't think any of them should be abandoned.
I see an abandoned patchset as an admittance by the person who wrote the patch that they never should have and that the feature or bugfix was so wrong, it could not even be fixed up. Most of the patches I've left sitting for a while aren't that bad.
Even if you don't subscribe to that view, leaving -1'd patches around isn't so terrible because they're a start along the right path. Rather than having someone else start on the same project in a totally new patch, because they didn't see the open change for the same purpose, I'd like them to take up the patch I started that is slightly flawed and finish it up. Abandoning patches will discourage this sort of behaviour. Even without auto-abandoning patches I have seen people work on things that I have already started on...
If we do wind up doing this, I foresee a lot more sleepless nights in my near future trying to catch up with all of the code review that has accumulated over the past 2 years during which I often got a few days or weeks to hack on a project and then couldn't come back to it for a while.
I really like sleep, guys. Let's leave things as they are.