[Development] abandoning stale changes on gerrit

[Alan Alpert]

On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 3:54 AM, Oswald Buddenhagen
<oswald.buddenhagen at digia.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 11:46:24AM -0800, Alan Alpert wrote:
>> On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 11:43 AM, Oswald Buddenhagen <oswald.buddenhagen at digia.com> wrote:
>> > the cut-off for dead changes will be set at two months (or more -
>> > tbd) without any activity (which is not pinging).
>>
>> Can we please have more specific criteria? "tbd" is not an exact
>> enough date range for me to start checking
>>
> tbd means exactly that: nobody has decided it yet. i think two or three
> months are a reasonable timeout. if somebody has strong opinions on that
> matter air them, otherwise i'll proclaim consensus in a few days.

Three months old (two months seems to be small enough that it could
too easily hit people on Summer/Christmas vacation), with the exact
same criteria for activity as the updated field in the web interface.
And provide at least a week between "proclaiming" the criteria and
applying them.

While I doubt we really need everyone to agree on the precise message,
there should be a specific (and non-confrontational) message applied
to the auto-abandoned changes. Something like "Due to a lack of
activity, this change looks to me to be abandoned. I am updating the
gerrit state to reflect this, just un-abandon the change if this was
in error" (except you're welcome to use fewer words ;) ).
Non-confrontational because occasional contributors might not
understand what's going on, and specific because then you can search
for auto-abandoned changes relatively easily without needing a
separate state.

--
Alan Alpert