[Spice-devel] SPICE: changing the merge rules - a proposal

[Francesco Giudici]

Hi,
   the community around the SPICE project always tried to follow one 
fundamental, implicit rule for accepting code contributions to the 
project: every merge request (beside trivial patches) should be reviewed 
and acked at least by one before getting merged.
While everyone agrees with this fundamental rule, the actual status of 
some SPICE projects makes the rule impractical to let the project move 
forward.
Let's consider the spice/spice project as an example: the number of 
contributions is very low, both on the commit side (only 4 different 
contributors with more than 1 commit from the beginning of the year, and 
a single contributor with 90% of commits) and on the review side (in the 
last 40 merge requests before the C++ switch one, 21 had no comments).
The x11spice project is another example: we have only 4 contributors 
from the beginning of the year (and a single contributor holding 70% of 
the commits) and the reviews on the gitlab merge requests have been 
provided by two people only, each one reviewing the merge requests of 
the other.
For the sake of having the projects being able to move forward with a 
reduced number of contributors/reviewers, the proposal is to *allow* a 
maintainer to merge a Merge Request without an explicit ack if the three 
following conditions are met:
1) The Merge Request has been pending for at least 3 weeks without 
getting new comments
2) The Merge Request submitter has kept asking a review on a weekly basis
3) There are no pending nacks on the Merge Request

Note that having patches reviewed would still be the preferred way. If 
at any time the number of contributors would raise again, we can switch 
back to the mandatory review rule. Until then the priority is to allow 
the project to move forward.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts and/or contribute with 
your own ideas.

Thanks

Francesco