> > 938 (9657) https://salsa.debian.org/groups/debian/-/merge_requests > [..] > > If you have some spare time for Debian today, please consider > > collaborating with another maintainer by providing them > > review/feedback on an open Merge Request. > > I gave this, specifically reviewing MRs in the debian namespace, a > try after your last message on this topic. Unfortunately I have to > say, it feels like a huge waste of time and is mostly frustrating.
Thanks! Seems we are now down to 838 open MRs in the Debian namespace. > I haven't noted down hard numbers, but my feeling is that 40%+ of the > MRs are from the janitor-bot, and mostly outdated. Anyone looking at > the list should immediately filter them out, because they are not > actionable in any way. I would recommend to just skip the janitor ones for now and focus on providing feedback to humans to facilitate collaboration (among humans). Eventually the person making an upload of a package would be the best person to merge/reject whatever janitor submitted ones are open. > The other big category of MRs in the debian namespace was and still > is: MRs where the maintainers don't get mails from salsa. If one is > active with the project, one can know who is currently around and > assign / ping them in the MR, and hope they'll respond after a few > days. The original submitter obviously is long gone, because these > MRs also sit there for years. I don't know exactly how Salsa is configured regarding notifications. I agree it should be optimized but don't know exactly how. Meanwhile, you can configure your own notification at https://salsa.debian.org/-/profile/notifications and at least ensure you are "watching" the pacakges you maintain. > Another is MRs for packages that were removed from unstable a long > time ago. I've closed them when I encountered them, but did not file > a ticket to get the repo archived (*). Thanks! > Having said that, my actions did get some MRs merged and a few > people were happy about that (thanks for the feedback!). But > overall, I still think it was a waste of time. The numbers are just > not in the favor of reviewers (and probably also not in favor of > maintainers). For sure, the first people going through the long list of pending MRs will wade through a lot of accumulated cruft. As a recurring MR review habit I'd expect people to only look at the MRs that are recent and focus on them. > Maybe a viable option for the debian namespace is to blanket close > any MR that is older than 6 months. But I don't know how that will > fare for the Janitor MRs. I would not recommend doing any blanket close. I'd rather err on the side of having some open in vain for a long time than throwing away something useful. I think my personal record is a patch I sent to Redis and it eventually got merged after being pending for 6 years. However, I would support the idea of bulk closing MRs and complete repositories *if* the package has been removed from Debian for the same reason we bulk close their bug reports. > Frustrated, > Chris Thanks for your efforts! I think you can now with a good conscience ignore old MRs and just focus on new ones next time you have time to review. The more DDs help with common namespace MR reviews, the less frustrating it will be to individual DDs.
