[gmx-developers] Changes without reviews

[Schulz, Roland]

> Before people get too active in removing old stuff - is that always what we
> want?
> 
> One *good* aspect with anybody being able to upload pretty much anything
> is that it also serves as a repository others can use to have a look at such a
> change, comment (even if it's still very far from actually making it into the
> master branch), or simply sharing development.
> 
> If we want to go the route of only having "prime" patches show up in Gerrit,
> we also need a strategy for where everything else should go - and then we
> might end up with a synchronization problem between the two places
> instead.

When it comes to changes the owner has stopped working on I don't think this is a problem. An abandoned change isn't deleted. It is still available in gerrit, can still be linked to from redmine, and can still be searched. If someone wants to abandon a draft (but keep a record) they just need to publish and then abandon. Note that makes it visible to everyone.

When it comes to new changes which aren't ready. I think we already have a convention for that. Prefix those with WIP. Also don't ask for review until you want to have review. That way it doesn't show up in the dashboard.

> It won't - but I think that's a task management issue, for which we should use
> a task management tool.  We spent a bunch of time evaluating different
> tools for a recent EU project, and for the software side of things we suddenly
> realised we have such a tool already: redmine :-)

In my experience that works even less. In most cases when I post something to redmine it doesn't get any response until I link to it from gerrit. And given it gets a response when linked to, I assume, that this usually has more to do with no one noticing rather than no interest. It seems we have currently two place which gets a lot of attention. The first page of open changes and the mailing list. We tend to use the mailing list very rarely, and we advertise our wish for review by rebasing. The later doesn't seem ideal for either reviewer or owner. If we want to move this more to redmine we have to find a way to also move attention from gerrit to redmine.

Roland