Triage Tuesdays + Thursdays
Motivation
Concerted effort to triage issues and Merge Requests in gitlab.
Especially the old pre-monorepo repositories, so we can archive those.
A lot of the existing issues, discussions, and MRs contain valuable information or contributions, we don't want to just close everything. We also don't want to just move all issues over into the monorepo without any triaging.
Idea
Make it a regular thing.
Make it short, so it doesn't become a burden. 5-10 minutes.
Constant dripping wears the stone etc.
Proposal
Triage on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Easy to remember, mid-week.
Two timeslots, e.g. 10.45h + 16.45h UK
- https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html?iso=20230504T094500&p1=299&p2=195&p3=1428&p4=438&p5=235&p6=240&p7=250
- https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html?iso=20230504T154500&p1=299&p2=195&p3=1428&p4=438&p5=235&p6=240&p7=250
Discussions in #gstreamer
(could make a separate channel, but there's usually not that much traffic in the main channel, and it might motivate other community members to help out or take care of their old issues and MRs)
Calendar events
gstreamer-triage-tuesdays-1.ics
gstreamer-triage-tuesdays-2.ics
gstreamer-triage-thursdays-1.ics
gstreamer-triage-thursdays-2.ics
gstreamer-triage-tuesdays-thursdays-all.ics
Goals
-
go through old issues and figure out which ones are still useful and relevant and either ping for more info or move to monorepo
-
go through old MRs and figure out which ones are still useful and should be moved over to the monorepo. Often contributors will not be motivated to re-submit an old MR against the monorepo, in which case the patch would have to be manually resubmitted or moved into a monorepo MR with a script.
Snippets
- should come up with some standard snippets we can paste into issues, apologising that no one ever got around to following up etc.
Gamification + Publicity
- collect stats and post updates on achievements
- maybe decide to focus on specific modules every week
Alternatives or Additional Support
-
have a bot that pings old/stale tickets, so that e-mails get generated and old stuff lands on GStreamer developers's radar
- would need to be severely rate limited (no more than a handful per day)
- might cause 'contention' (everyone checking out the same old tickets at the same time once the mail goes out)
-
might be useful to have a bot that pings new tickets that haven't seen any reponse within the last 25 days or so, to prevent them from becoming stale (most developers will have a notification-based workflow so everything that's not handled immediately often falls under the table until someone comes across it again later)
Open Questions
- any new labels that would be useful?