Re: who is doing patch-review -> patch-countdown

[Graham Percival]

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 09:48:56AM +0100, David Kastrup wrote:
> James <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > On 19 February 2013 22:25, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
> >     
> >     Our rule basically is "if you bypass the proper review process,
> >     you deserve everything you get if there is any problem".
> >
> > I'm not sure how Colin decided this kind of case
> 
> The thing is simple: it's not in your job description as a patch meister
> to decide this kind of case, namely make decisions based on technical
> expertise or getting into arguments with developers.  In a manner,
> Graham is right that this is an administrative job.  Your look is to
> take a look at the review and discussion, judge whether the discussion
> about possibly unresolved or unaddressed points has settled and/or the
> issue has been sitting on review long enough in relation to its
> superficial complexity/size/type, and then shift status accordingly.

Yes.  Furthermore, I would say that there's no requirement for any
time spent to be spent in Patch-review.  If James want to wait,
that's up to him, but as far as I imagined the procedure,
anything[1] marked Patch-review when he starts a new countdown can
be turned into Patch-countdown.

[1] the one exception is if there's a sudden spike of patches: if
there's more than 8-10 patches, I'd suggest restricting the
countdown to only 8 and putting the rest on the next one.


> Personally, I don't see that people should in general be setting
> "Patch-countdown" on their own.

+1

> There may be some excusable case when
> you stated "this would have been on countdown in case the trivial points
> x and y had been addressed" and we are early in the countdown phase.
> But maybe it is better in this case if you state "Patch xxx is
> tentatively on countdown but will not move to patch-push unless the
> trivial points x and y have been addressed".  That way your bookkeeping
> reflects the actual flow of state.

I'd rather have those patches changed to Patch-needswork.  If it's
only a trivial fix... then so what?  Let the submitter make that
trivial fix, and it'll get on the countdown next time.

As with the Bug Squad procedures ("find any excuse to reject a
report, put the onus on the reporter to clarify the report"), I
heartily encourage the Patch Meister to put the onus on the patch
submitter to wait patiently or fix whatever needs fixing.  Since
we have relatively few active developers, I think that being
conservative here is not a bad thing.

Cheers,
- Graham