Patches for trivial bugs sitting in bugzilla -> trivial patch policy?

[Sandro Mani]

Hi,

 From time to time, I see trivial patches posted in bugzilla which end 
up sitting there because the maintainer is too busy / gets bombarded 
with tons of bugzilla mails and misses that particular one / whatever 
reason. As a packager, sometimes it seems very hard to get such trivial 
patches applied. What you can do is

- You can keep pinging bugzilla
- You can apply for commit rights, which might be excessive for just 
this one patch, and still requires the maintainer to answer.
- You can start the non-responsive maintainer procedure, even if you 
know perfectly well that the maintainer is still active. Or you might 
suspect that the maintainer is inactive, but you'd rather not have to 
wait for an entire month, because this one bug is blocking your work.
- You can start asking on irc for a proven packager to jump in and hope 
a proven packager is online and has time at that moment.
- You can post on -devel, though again, unless someone has time right 
now it gets forgotten an people move on.
- Repeat the above n times until someone shouts at you and flags your 
email as spam :)

So wondering, if there is a way we can improve the situation. One idea 
which comes to mind would be something like "trivial patch policy"
- after i.e. one week of inactivity one can flag such a bug as a trivial 
bug. You can only do so if you are a packager and post a patch (which 
also updates the SPEC, so just a matter of apply patch, fedpkg commit & 
build).
- for anything else than packaging issues, the patch may only be a well 
justified upstream commit backport
- a proven packagers gets notified about the issue, validates the patch 
and if ok fires the update. The entire thing might work similar to how a 
New Package / Package Change request works, by posting something like 
this to the bug:
   Trivial Patch Request
   =====================
   Patch[branch]:
   Patch[other_branch]:
   Reason:
   Upstream commit:
   Submitter:


 From my experience such situations do not occur too frequently, but 
when they happen, they can be hard to deal with.

Comments?

Thanks,
Sandro