Open Stack

On 10/10/2015 08:12 AM, Jeremy Stanley wrote:
> On 2015-10-09 17:10:15 -0500 (-0500), Ben Nemec wrote:
>> As discussed in the meeting a week or two ago, we would like to bring
>> back the auto-abandon functionality for old, unloved gerrit reviews.
> [...]
>> -WIP patches are never abandoned
> [...]
>> -Patches that are failing CI for over a month on the same patch set
>> (regardless of any followup comments - the intent is that patches
>> expected to fail CI should be marked WIP).
> [...]
> 
> Have you considered the possibility of switching stale changes to
> WIP instead of abandoning them?


That might be a valid alternative.  I'll bring it up in the meeting
tomorrow.

> 
> I usually have somewhere around 50-100 open changes submitted (often
> more), and for some of those I might miss failures or negative
> review comments for a month or so at a time depending on what else I
> have going on. It's very easy to lose track of a change if someone
> abandons it for me.

I have to admit I had missed this point in previous discussions on the
topic, and it is a valid concern IMHO.

As an alternative to just setting WIP on old changes, we could
significantly increase the abandon timeout.  I re-ran the tool with some
different timeouts to get more data points.  Here's what I found:

Days - # of changes to be abandoned
31 - 36
90 - 29
180 - 20
365(!) - 12

So even setting the timeout to 1 year, which I think we can all agree is
safe to call abandoned, we'd catch 12 changes.  Hence the desire for a
cleanup bot. :-)

I kind of like 90 or 180 as a happy medium.  It would still clear a
non-trivial amount of patches, but I think after six months of neglect
we can safely call a patch abandoned by the submitter.  I'm inclined to
say 90 is safe too, but I'm okay with 180 and I do want to err on the
side of leaving things open so that would work for me.