[Development] abandoning stale changes on gerrit

[Rick Stockton]

On 01/31/2013 04:08 AM, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
> << SNIP >>
>
> introducing a separate state isn't necessarily a bad idea.
> however, from a single user's perspective i don't see a difference to
> starring the still relevant changes, and i have doubts that making the
> owner's expectations regarding particular changes globally visible would
> actually add any value.

Agreed, for the owner of a limited number of changes. But for the
Maintainer, and for statistics collection - It might be very useful. We
have even given this Thread the title "abandoning stale changes on
Gerrit". Therefore, why not create a new change State, called "Stale" ?
I think that there is a big difference between:

(a) truly "abandoned" == Thrown away, because the problem was solved
differently (or labeled "out of scope", "invalid, etc.). I have several
of these, with no need to look at them again - although Gerrit should
keep them because they might contain clues for someone about what do do
(and what NOT to do) in writing a future change, or extracting a "draft"
of a particular function working within that area of Qt.

(b) merely "stale" == not touched recently, because PreReqs are up in
the air, or a listed Reviewer needs to be replaced, or the original
Developer can no longer track his/her contributions, or it's waiting for
promotion from the "Development" Branch (e.g., 5.2 changes awaiting 5.1
Release). Typically, waiting for another Gerrit event, but still under
serious consideration for a future Release. (I haven't got any of these
at the moment, but a lot of you Devs have a ton of them.) I think that
we should avoid confusing these two situations (i.e., using the same
"status" value) when we move Changes from "In Review" State for the
reason of reaching the Stale Expiration Timer.

If the separation which I recommend later proves to be a relatively
useless complication, then we can easily reset all the "Stale" changes
back into "Abandoned" State quite easily. But going othe other
direction, separating out a significant number of "Golden Needles" from
a Mountain of "truly dead" Changes, all makred as "Abandoned": That will
become increasingly difficult as the number of "stale" changes
increases, and future cases of Developer turnover occur.

IMO, Play it safe == a new status value for for this "Stale" status. Is
this a hard thing to do?

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