[webkit-dev] review queue crazy idea

[Ojan Vafai]

There are currently 38 (of 171 total) patches in the review queue where the
bugs have not been modified in over 1 month old. I propose we have a bot
that educates people about writing easy to review patches and auto-rejects
any patches in bugs that haven't been touched in over a month. For people
new-ish to the WebKit project, it is often confusing both degree of
responsibility that lies with the contributor to make the patch easy to
review and the need to get reviewers' attention for a given patch.

This is just an initial proposal. I'm not wed to any of the details of how
this would work. I do think that auto-rejecting old patches is valuable to
the project as a whole. Having the review queue be so large makes
it daunting for any reviewer to try and tackle it. On the other hand,
knowing that patches will magically fall off the end of the queue might
encourage reviewers to just ignore some patches.

An alternative to auto-rejecting patches would be to send a nag email once a
week to webkit-reviewers@ with the list of patches that are over a month
old.


Here are my initial thoughts on what a review bot would do.

*After a patch turns a week old, send the following email:*
Patch 12345 of bug 6789 is a week old. It may just be because no reviewer
has found time to review it. But there may be steps you can take to help get
your patch reviewed. See http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/CodeReview for a few
suggestions.

-WebKit review bot

*After the patch is three weeks old:*
Patch 12345 of bug 6789 is three weeks old. If it is still unreviewed in a
week, it will automatically be rejected. It may just be because no reviewer
has found time to review it. But there may be steps you can take to help get
your patch reviewed. See http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/CodeReview for a few
suggestions.

-WebKit review bot

*After the patch is a month old:*
Patch 12345 of bug 6789 has been rejected because it is too old. This is
likely because no webkit reviewer has been able to review it. If you would
still like the patch reviewed, then please do the following:

   1. Make sure your patch still applies to tip of tree.
   2. Do as many of the suggestions at
   http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/CodeReview as possible.
   3. Upload your patch for review again.

-Webkit Review Bot
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