Am I right if I say that BibLibre will be the company mostly concerned
impacted by this rule ? Checking numbers.
Some numbers: there are 131 patches waiting for signoff or QA. 52 are
from BibLibre (40%)

Yes, because I already informed Elliott that under no circumstances would I accept him QAing a patch by ByWater.

Displaying by "date of last change" (ie= there's been no activity on
this bug since...)
* August= 9 patches: 5 BibLibre, 1 OSSlab, 1 ByWater, 3 others
* September = 8 patches: 4 BibLibre, 3 ByWater, 1 other
* October = 27 patches: 14 BibLibre, 3 ACPL, 6 ByWater, 4 others
(All of them are Enhancements or New Feature)

At the end, my opinion is that it's a little bit unfair (and I restart a
long-standing discussion/complain...) BibLibre does a huge of effort to
submit all his development, and be quick when there is feedback.

The very bad side effect of delays is that we loose a lot of energy in
rebasing, just because there's no feedback from anyone, and when someone
step-in the patch does not apply any more.

We fully accept the rule for not self-signing the patch, because,
functionally speaking, I agree that it's good to have an external eye.
(and that's more important with large features)

But the QA is a *technical* check of the code. If something is wrong (ie
don't respect our guidelines, has a bad side effect, ...), as QAer, I'll
do *exactly* the same thing whoever the patch come from.

If I were suspicious, I could even say that you imply that, when
Jonathan or me QA a patch from BibLibre, we're biased, and I could be
upset by your suspicion (I'm not, I'm just very sad that this discussion
started again, while I thought it was solved)

I never "promote" BibLibre patches, I always QA by date of last change,
ie: I QA the older patch without activity. Yesterday, I QAed something
like 10 patches, iirc, 2 from BibLibre failed QA (including one just
because there was some PODDOC missing !)

Chris-es are proposing what could be a fair rule imo = "if no one step
up". What could be considered as "no one step up" being the next question...

Agreed. At some point there may be no choice. I'm pretty sure we have had a backlog in the Signed Off queue for a long time, possibly since always (Chris has a nice graph somewhere, but I don't know where). In light of that, I think two months would be reasonable.

Also, it's worth pointing out that we have a QA *team*. If there's a BibLibre patch that's been signed off that isn't getting QAed, it is absolutely reasonable for you to e-mail the koha-devel list a message something like: "[QA] Does anyone have time to review poor benighted bug XXXX?" There's no guarantee someone will, but a list of forty bugs clamoring for attention is daunting, and with no particular reason for choosing one over the other, the chance of another QAA choosing to review your particular bug is very slight. On the other hand, if you ask, someone just might. I've been known to repeatedly overlook patches that provide functionality that I want when looking for a patch to sign off, either because the list is just too long or because I don't recognize what the patch does from the description (for example, at one point I was going to try testing the non-linear updates, but thought it was already signed off because I didn't see the patch in the "Needs Signoff" list... and that went on for months; it was only when chris_n signed off on the patch that I realized the bug was called "updatedatabase improvements" and not "non-linear updates" or the like).

Regards,

Jared

--
Jared Camins-Esakov

Bibliographer, C & P Bibliography Services, LLC

(phone) +1 (917) 727-3445

(e-mail) jcamins@cpbibliography.com

(web) http://www.cpbibliography.com/