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

[Frediano Ziglio]

> 
> 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
> 

Hi,
   I agree on the proposal. This problem has been going on for years now.
The issue involve all repositories. The active part of community dealing
with code review is very low.
I think 3 weeks are perfectly fine. We should be in a trustful community,
if somebody is very busy in daily activity or on holidays whomever remains
should be in charge. Is not that is a person in a team goes on holiday all
the work of the team is impeded.

Frediano