Tim Landscheidt tim@tim-landscheidt.de wrote:
I'm all for abandoning changes when the author doesn't react and the patch doesn't apply anymore (not in a technical sense, but the patch's concept cannot be rebased to the cur- rent HEAD). But forcing work on many just so that a metric can be easier calculated by one is putting the burden on the wrong side.
As somebody who contributes something in development surges (like a week per three months or so), I think that cleaning up statistics to make our code review process look nicer is not the way to go.
What about automatically accepting the change that has not been reviewed by anybody for two weeks or so instead?
I agree that -1 is practically a death penalty to a change. But that's not a positive development, because even a mild -1's completety discourages anybody to post a positive review (I wonder how many +1 or neutral comments were posted *after* some of the WMF reviewers posted a -1).
Some examples from my own dashboard:
1) https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/99068/
practically dead although I completely disagree with the -1 reviewer, as reflected in the comment afterwards.
2) https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/11562/
My favourite -1 here is "needs rebase".
In general our review process disourages somehow incremental updating of the patches (do we know how many non-original-submitters posted follow up patchsets, not comments?).
This kind of review discourages refactoring or some non-trivial changes. See "seems too complex" in the example #2 above.
Regarding Openstack policies: I'd say we should not follow them.
I used to be #2 git-review contributor according to launchpad until recently. I gave up mainly because of my inability to propose some larger change to this relatively simple script. For a nice example of this, please see
https://review.openstack.org/#/c/5720/
I have given up to contribute to this project some time after this, I have no time to play politics to submit a set of tiny changes and play the rebase game depending on the random order they might would have got reviewed.
The next time I find time to improve Johnny the causual developer experience with gerrit I will just rewrite git-review from scratch. The amount of the red tape openstack-infra has built around their projects is simply not justifiable for such a simple utility like git-review. Time will tell if gerrit-based projects generally fare better than others.
//Saper