Subject: Re: Commitfest 2024-01 first week update

From: Alvaro Herrera <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2024 10:02:12 +0100

On 2024-Jan-10, Daniel Gustafsson wrote:

> > On 9 Jan 2024, at 23:18, Robert Haas <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> > I think we need to be more aggressive about marking things returned
> > with feedback when they don't get updated.
> 
> I very much agree.  Having marked quite a lot of patches as RwF when being CFM
> I can attest that it gets very little off-list pushback or angry emails.  While
> it does happen, the overwhelming majority of responses are understanding and
> positive, so no CFM should be worried about "being the bad guy".

I like this idea very much -- return patches when the author does not
respond AFTER receiving feedback or the patch rotting.

However, this time around I saw that a bunch of patches were returned or
threatened to be returned JUST BECAUSE nobody had replied to the thread,
with a justification like "you need to generate more interest in your
patch".  This is a TERRIBLE idea, and there's one reason why creating a
new commitfest entry in the following commitfest is no good: 

At the FOSDEM developer meeting, we do a run of CF patch triage, where
we check the topmost patches in order of number-of-commitfests.  If you
return an old patch and a new CF entry is created, this number is reset,
and we could quite possibly fail to detect some very old patch because
of this.  At times, the attention a patch gets during the CF triage is
sufficient to get the patch moving forward after long inactivity, so
this is not academic.  Case in point: [1].

So by all means let's return patches that rot or fail to get updated per
feedback.  But DO NOT return patches because of inactivity.

[1] https://postgr.es/m/[email-masked]

-- 
Álvaro Herrera        Breisgau, Deutschland  —  https://www.EnterpriseDB.com/
"Las cosas son buenas o malas segun las hace nuestra opinión" (Lisias)

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From: vignesh C <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2024 20:21:15 +0530

> new commitfest entry in the following commitfest is no good:

I have seen that most of the threads are being discussed and being
promptly updated. But very few of the entries become stale and just
move from one commitfest to another commitfest without anything being
done. For these kinds of entries, we were just trying to see if the
author or anybody is really interested or not in pursuing it.

We should do something about these kinds of entries, there were few
suggestions like tagging under a new category or so, can we add a new
status to park these entries something like "Waiting for direction".
The threads which have no discussion for 6 months or so can be flagged
to this new status and these can be discussed in one of the developer
meetings or so and conclude on these items.

Regards,
Vignesh

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From: Jacob Champion <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2024 10:47:52 -0800

> meetings or so and conclude on these items.

See also [1], with a patch suggestion. IIRC, there was also related
discussion on making the "resurrection" process single-step so that
you don't lose history, per Alvaro's concern.

--Jacob

[1] https://postgr.es/m/flat/CAAWbhmjM6hn_3sjVBUyqVKysWVAtsBOkaNt01QF3AMOCunuKMg%40mail.gmail.com