merge reviews

[Jeff Garzik]

On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 6:26 PM, Bill Nottingham <notting at redhat.com> wrote:
> I'd like not to assume the worst, but given your mass closing of some
> review bugs, plus your arguments here about why, plus your request for
> a review swap earlier, I'm having trouble reading this as anything other
> than a transparent frustration at your package not getting reviewed
> fast enough for your liking, with an unsaid assertion that it's part of
> the 'wheat' above.

Cute re-ordering of events, there.  No, after repeated experiences
with seeking reviews, including this most recent one mentioned
elsewhere on this list, and seeing others on this list repeating
review requests, I was inspired to poke around to see why responses
were so uneven.

Looking at the process with fresh eyes, starting from
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageReviewProcess and moving to
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/ReviewRequests one
sees a chaotic mess of package reviews, both assigned and unassigned,
not really moving forward at all.  Looking closely, you see a lot of
packages that seem of worth, but that set is crowded by review
requests for ancient packages like redhat-menus or kernel.

In an ideal world, every package in fedora/devel would get a full
package re-review prior to each release.  But with finite resources
limiting that, it seemed to me that triaging long-dead bugs for
long-merged packages was a reasonable and helpful thing for the Fedora
project.  By all appearances, nobody else was bothering with these
things after several years went by.

If people want these obviously unloved, ignored review requests -- not
even an rpmlint or ping in many cases -- to stick around, that's fine
with me.  I thought I was being helpful, but easy enough to leave
things alone as well.

My hail review was proceeding, and I wanted to make the process a bit
easier for the -next- person wanting a review.  Apologies for the
ruffled feathers.

The process itself is intimidating, because the wikis demand that a
prospective reviewer wade into a completely unorganized swamp (BZ URLs
linked-to from above URLs), hundreds of review requests, with next to
zero information about where one's review would be most helpful.  To
an outsider, it must seem like quite a mess, with completely unknown
chances for success/failure.

     Jeff