* Otto Kekäläinen <o...@debian.org> [250114 23:14]: > Numerous people are posting Merge Requests on Salsa. Please help review them! > > There is no single dashboard to show all Merge Requests for all Debian > packages, but here are the largest teams listed to show how many they > have open (and total count in parentheses): > > 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. I haven't noted down hard numbers, but my feeling is that 40%+ of the MRs are from the janitor-bot, and mostly outdated.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. Then a lot of the MRs I looked at were "cleary good idea", but were being ignored for _years_. I'm guessing this is because the maintainer of the respective package is just AWOL, and we don't have a process for dealing with that. In that case one can opt to make their own life more miserable by doing a review, apply, test build, test and "team upload", and at some point one will see the MR submitter didn't bother testing the change. 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. 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 (*). 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). 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. Frustrated, Chris (*) there's a limit to "boring but someone needs to do it" where I'll step in.
