unity-dev team mailing list archive

[Sam Spilsbury <smspillaz@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hey all.

There seems to be a disturbing trend in the development process where there
seems to be very little follow up on contributions and code review.

Have a look at http://code.launchpad.net/unity/+activereviews to see what I
mean. We have tons of potential bug fixes, new tests and otherwise awesome
functionality which has been sitting there for weeks, months and
(dareisayit) years(!!) clogging up the reviews page, and probably
negatively impacting team morale.

Most of the stuff there tends to fall into one of three categories:

1. Not even looked at yet
2. Looked at, marked "Needs Fixing", or "Needs Information" with no follow
up from the original contributor
3. Looked at, marked one of the above, followed up by the contributor, but
not followed up by the reviewer
4. Approved, but not globally approved and marked for merging.

I propose that we need to do the following, for each of the categories:

For category 1, someone needs to look at it ASAP and leave some kind of
review, so the contributor can at least be engaged again.

For categories 2, 3 and 4, I propose that we all determine a time to meet
in a public forum (eg #ubuntu-unity) to decide:

a. What we can drop, or mark "Rejected" as the fix, improvement or test is
no longer relevant or desired.
b. What we actually want to keep because it has some value, and who will be
assigned to making sure it actually gets into trunk (whether that be the
original contributor, or someone else who wants to take on that work).

We can't continue in the current state. It reflects incredibly poorly upon
all the developers, and is warding off new contributors.

Best Regards,

Sam