Let's close the remaining merge reviews

[Cole Robinson]

Hi all,

In case readers don't know, this page describes what a merge review is:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Merge_Reviews

In short: when fedora core and extras merged, a Package Review was opened for
every package in core. The idea was that every core package would be reviewed
to ensure it met with the extras packaging guidelines. It has never blocked
anything, it's just a best effort 'we should do this one day'.

Since 1 year ago (2013-03-24), 8 merge reviews have been closed as either
RAWHIDE, CURRENTRELEASE, or NEXTRELEASE.

There's currently 126 open merge reviews. Of those, since 2013-03-24, 8 have
received new comments. The breakdown is:

Not related to any progress on the merge review (account closings mostly):
226640, 226497

Related to the merge review but not indicative of any progress being made
(pings, 'what is this bug for', ...): 225755, 226425

Varying amounts of attempted review (4 bugs): 225989, 226209, 225708, 226140

So in the past 12 months, there's been some positive activity on 12 merge
reviews. But 116 have sat totally dormant. Many have not been touched for over
five years.

Keeping these reviews open has a real cost:

- Developer confusion in the form of 'what is this bug, why should I care'
(there's lots of that in the comments of these reviews from over the years).

- Reviewer confusion when they go to this page:
http://fedoraproject.org/PackageReviewStatus/    I experienced this when I
first went to the page, and had to go read up on it.

- Reviewer energy, for those folks that make a valiant attempt only for
repeated pings to go unanswered. And yet I don't blame maintainers for not
caring much about a merge review. And they are easy to ignore: personally I
don't track bugs assigned to me so much as I track bugs belonging to the
packages I care about, so I'm sure many maintainers don't even know these open
bugs exist, since the component is 'Package Review'.

- Bugzilla search times on open bugs (okay that's probably a stretch :) )

I suggest we just close all these bugs. I'm happy to do the autoclosing, add
myself to the CC, and handle any follow up comments. I propose a message like
this:

"We've decided to close all merge reviews:

<link to this thread>

If there is any in-progress work lingering, or if anyone is interested in
completing this review, please reopen this bug and reassign the bug to the
actual component."

An alternative would be to reassign every open merge review to the component
in question, and let maintainers handle it as they like.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Cole