Re: Clean up state on patchwork

[ricaljasan <ricaljasan at pacific dot net>]

On 09/28/2015 10:36 AM, Carlos O'Donell wrote:
> On 09/28/2015 11:43 AM, Joseph Myers wrote:
>>> will simply grow forever, and that's fine.
>>
>> It should only grow forever because of patches blocked on something other 
>> than review.
> 
> This is only true if we actually have the resources capable of handling
> the volume of patches submitted? Which I surmise that at present we don't
> otherwise the patch queue would be going down.

It sounds like states are a secondary issue, and the real problem is not
enough reviewers (or not enough reviewers reviewing).  While keeping
patchwork tidy may ease the reviewer's task, I'm not sure the following
question is the right one to be asking:

> So given the present situation of not enough reviewers, how do we prevent
> the NEW queue from growing unbounded?

If there are that many NEW patches requiring review, it is what it is.
Shuffling them off into alternate states might keep the NEW count down,
but it doesn't keep the number of patches still requiring review down.
And if you pile on the additional task of going through all those
patches just to review them for their state (saving the actual review
for later), I think you're detracting from the solution to the real problem.

(Not an argument to not keep patchwork tidy, btw.)

So now I'm curious: what does it take to be a qualified reviewer?  I see
quite a bit of information in:

https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/HomePage#Development

but it seems to be directed at contributors and maintainers.  Is
"reviewer" synonymous with "maintainer" in the current thread's context?

rj