[openstack-dev] auto-abandon changesets considered harmful (was Re: [stable][all] Revisiting the 6 month release cycle [metrics])

James E. Blair corvus at inaugust.com
Mon Mar 2 15:17:35 UTC 2015


John Griffith <john.griffith8 at gmail.com> writes:

> For what it's worth, at one point the Cinder project setup an auto-abandon
> job that did purge items that had a negative mark either from a reviewer or
> from Jenkins and had not been updated in over two weeks.  This had
> absolutely nothing to do with metrics or statistical analysis of the
> project.  We simply had a hard time dealing with patches that the submitter
> "didn't care about".  If somebody takes the time to review a patch, then I
> don't think it's too much to ask that the submitter respond to questions or
> comments within a two week period.  Note, the auto purge in our case only
> purged items that had no updates or activity at all.
>
> We were actually in a position where we had patches that were submitted,
> failed unit tests in the gate (valid failures that occurred 100% of the
> time) and had sat for an entire release without the submitter ever updating
> the patch. I don't think it's unreasonable at all to abandon these and
> remove them from the queue.  I don't think this is a bad thing, I think
> it's worse to leave them as active when they're bit-rotted and the
> submitter doesn't even care about them any longer.  The other thing is,
> those patches are "still there", they can still be accessed and reinstated.

I understand and agree with where you are coming from -- I'm just saying
that "abandon" is the wrong tool to accomplish this.  If a patch is "in
the queue" but is failing tests and hasn't been updated in a release,
then we should find a way to remove it from "the queue" without
abandoning it.  The solution should not impinge on core reviewers' time.
I believe we have the tools needed to do this, but have either not
implemented them or communicated about them correctly.

I'm happy to help identify potential solutions that don't involve
abandoning others' patches if people would be willing to tell me where
this is causing them problems.

-Jim



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