Jason L Tibbitts III (tibbs(a)math.uh.edu) said:
Some Red Hat employees are opening new merge review tickets for
packages
which were in extras long before the big core-extras merge. It looks
like all of these packages are so old that the reviews predate the use
of Red Hat's bugzilla for the purpose, and so those reviews were either
done on the old mailing list or in the old fedora.us bugzilla (which I
believe has been lost).
No Fedora policy requires that these packages be re-reviewed. The
evidence seems to point to some Red Hat policy requiring review tickets
for these packages, although I can't seem to get a proper answer from
someone who actually knows.
There is a new internal process that encourages that packages have
existing Fedora reviews. This is likely a consequence of that, although
it's certainly never mentioned directly in the process. (I'd suspect that
there is likely to be some uptick in merge review activity as well.)
Given that the reviewers are currently
overburdened and are barely able to keep up with existing submissions,
plus the fact that we still have a few hundred of the original merge
review tickets still open, I don't think that adding more to the pile is
going to be remotely helpful. If there's a Red Hat policy which
requires this, then Red Hat should be taking care of this instead of
leaving it to the overburdened Fedora community. The fact that there's
been no communication about it only adds insult to injury.
I propose that the 'Product' on these tickets be changed to something
other than 'Fedora' so that they don't appear to be part of any Fedora
process. I'm happy to do that if someone can tell me which component to
use.
How so? They're reviews of Fedora packages. If the queue's not being
processed quickly, the queue won't be processed quickly. If these reviews
need quick attention, then I suspect resources will need to be assigned
to them. If they don't, then they won't. I'm not convinced that adding
12 packages to the queue (the current count of these) is anything to
worry about, given that we get more new submissions than that per
week already without any other controls.
Bill