[Development] abandoning stale changes on gerrit

[Rutledge Shawn]

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.

I do actually abandon stuff when it's quite clear that it's dead, but due to the review and CI processes, there's quite a large percentage of what I write that has hit some sort of obstacle and yet is still a good idea to somehow get done.

New stuff that doesn't make it for 5.1 is still eligible for 5.2 anyway; that's what comes out of having time-based releases, and that's the point of having an ongoing dev branch too.

I also don't pay attention to anyone else's clutter.  I understand that some people receive too many review requests, but here are some ideas to deal with that:

1) At least they are sorted by date so you can pay more attention to the newer ones
2) If a patch is being neglected due to inactivity but still needs to be reviewed, the author can always ping you on IRC.  So ignoring inactive requests is not necessarily bad.
3) You can remove yourself as a reviewer to get it off your list and stop getting emails
4) You can nag the author and ask that it either be abandoned or have you removed as a reviewer
5) Maybe we could add an easy nag button for that in gerrit
6) Have gerrit "expire" the reviewers on inactive patches, without abandoning the patch.  Extra points for having gerrit remember that this happened so it's easy for the author to re-add the reviewer when it's really ready.
7) Add filters to gerrit, to hide patches that someone has already reviewed (hide anything with -1, -2 or +2), hide patches that are too old, just show the top 20 or whatever your personal threshold is.  (kindof like writing an email client)