[Development] abandoning stale changes on gerrit

[Alan Alpert]

On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 10:43 AM, Rutledge Shawn
<Shawn.Rutledge at digia.com> wrote:
>
> On 29 Jan 2013, at 1:41 PM, Sorvig Morten wrote:
>
>>
>> On Jan 29, 2013, at 1:05 PM, Oswald Buddenhagen <oswald.buddenhagen at digia.com> wrote:
>>
>>> moin *,
>>>
>>> 5.0 is out and the 5.1 feature freeze isn't that far off any more.
>>> seems like the best time for some serious house cleaning.
>>> therefore i'd like to urge everyone to give their pending changes which
>>> haven't seen activity for a long time a honest look.
>>> please explicitly mark the ones you still want to work on by adding a
>>> comment. everything which has no indication of (planned) activity in a
>>> few weeks will be abandoned by administrative action.
>>> if you are an ex-troll/-nokian, please also check the dashboard of your
>>> alter ego.
>>> if you are a maintainer, give identified drive-by contributors a ping.
>>> i'd also like to encourage everyone to adopt orphaned changes they have
>>> an interest in.
>>
>>
>> Please don't abandon my changes, I prefer managing the list myself.
>
> I agree; I will not like being disrupted this way.


It would have been nice to check for consensus first (a two year old
mail thread isn't exactly the mandate of heaven), before diving into
an aggressive implementation. In case we don't reach some kind of
consensus (or stern mail from Lars, exactly the mandate of heaven ;)
),  an easy way to avoid Oswald's reign of destruction is just to
automatically add a "keepalive" comment to all changes you're involved
in. It's "easy" using the command line interface, you can do it in a
single (pipe)line:

gerrit-cmd query "$1" --current-patch-set | grep "revision" | cut -d:
-f2 | xargs gerrit-cmd review --message "$2"

Where gerrit-cmd is a script I use for the cmd line interface (just
"ssh -p 443 aalpert-rim at ssh.qt-project.org gerrit $@ ", a convenience
for the repeated part), $1 is a query (for all open changes on your
dashboard, try "status:open (owner:self OR reviewer:self)" except that
we don't seem to have self in our gerrit... you'll have to use your
username) and $2 is a message ( like '"keepalive"' - note that strings
need to be double wrapped "'like this'" to get through the shell on
both ends). Obvious warning, be careful using the gerrit command line
interface because you will be held just as accountable for your
actions as if you did them by hand (which is why my instructions
require a little assembly, to force a little thought ;) ).

That said, I'd prefer it for us to reach a consensus that the
abandoned state should mean abandoned (adj 2 of
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/abandoned) instead of destroyed (past
participle of verb 1, http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/destroy). Then
abandoning stale changes is simply changing the gerrit state to more
accurately reflect the state of reality. Also we don't have annoying
"keepalive" comments all over the place (I don't mean to pick on
Shawn, but even the manual comments this thread has already spawned
feel like odd clutter, a literal "keepalive" on
https://codereview.qt-project.org/#change,38313 for example).

Does anyone have a problem with agreeing to all treat abandoned gerrit
changes in this fashion? That they are merely 'not worked on', and for
the why (replaced, wrong, stale, lost contributor, etc.) you need to
actually look at it? This should also clarify that they should never
be deleted en masse.

--
Alan Alpert