Thursday, 29 June 2023

Re: git-ubuntu MP workflows in Launchpad

On Thu, Jun 29, 2023 at 11:12:43AM -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
> However, as you point out, this does create a secondary issue of making
> it harder to make things disappear from the sponsorship queue
> _intentionally_. For the server team workflow, the unclosable cruft
> seems to be a minor annoyance we just live with, but the volume we deal
> with is relatively small and we've got informal ways to connect
> our small number of internal reviewers and reviewees so the problem is
> not hard for us to work around.

> For the patch pilot workflow, the volume is higher and the number of
> reviewers broader, so I suspect a harder-to-make-things-disappear
> issue might present as much if not more pain than the slot-stealing
> glitch.

This is my concern as well. An important part of patch piloting is
identifying when a change is not ready for sponsorship, and sending it back
to the submitter for revision. When this is done, it's on the submitter to
re-submit it for sponsorship. If patch pilots have to track this, we are
going to spend a lot of time polling MPs that are not ready for sponsorship.

I think the least-effort approach is for the handling of MPs for sponsorship
to match the handling of bugs: ~ubuntu-sponsors is unsubscribed, and it's
the responsibility of the submitter to re-subscribe them (and patch pilots
have an obligation to make this clear with a comment).

A more clever approach would be to use a magic zero-member reviewer as Robie
proposes, but to filter out any MPs from the sponsorship queue which have a
negative review from a sponsor, and no further activity on the MP (either
comments or commits) after that point.

--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer https://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org