launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Jeroen Vermeulen <jtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2011-10-12 18:16, Nigel Babu wrote:

> I think it would be a nice idea to have team admins be able to set a
> certain number of days or months after which an application is either
> automatically rejected or expired (like we do for bugs).  This makes
> things cleaner and more flexible for all teams that use Launchpad.

That does sound nice.  And as you said on IRC, “a year” is arbitrary.

But how often can a team owner predict exactly what to do should they 
ever be unable to attend to requests for precisely, say, 18 days?  It's 
still arbitrary, just with a knob for people to twiddle and argue over.

Is arbitrary so bad?  Maybe not.  Expiry is a way to deal with 
breakdowns in management by humans, not a substitute for it.  If we draw 
a visible line at one year, maybe the humans will be stimulated to do 
better.  A 3-year backlog of requests, mostly no longer relevant, 
certainly won't stimulate them.

Finally, but most importantly: if we want to do this, it had better be 
as simple as it can be or we'll never get around to it.


Jeroen