Re: [TOPIC 16/17] “I want a reviewer”

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Fri, Mar 13, 2020 at 09:25:31PM +0000, Eric Wong wrote:

> > 6. Peff: this is all possible on the mailing list. I see things that look
> > interesting, and have a to do folder. If someone replies, I’ll take it off
> > the list. Once a week go through all the items. I like the book club idea,
> > instead of it being ad hoc, or by me, a group of a few people review the
> > list in the queue. You might want to use a separate tool, like IRC, but it
> > would be good to have it bring it back to the mailing list as a summary.
> > Public inbox could be better, but someone needs to write it. Maybe nerd
> > snipe Eric?
> 
> What now? :o
> 
> There's a lot of things it could be better at, but a more
> concrete idea of what you want would help.

short answer: searching for threads that only one person participated in

The discussion here was around people finding useful things to do on the
list: triaging or fixing bugs, responding to questions, etc. And I said
my mechanism for doing that was to hold interesting-looking but
not-yet-responded-to mails in my git-list inbox, treating it like a todo
list, and then eventually:

  1. I sweep through and spend time on each one.

  2. I see that somebody else responded, and I drop it from my queue.

  3. It ages out and I figure that it must not have been that important
     (I do this less individually, and more by occasionally declaring
     bankruptcy).

That's easy for me because I use mutt, and I basically keep my own list
archive anyway. But it would probably be possible to use an existing
archive and just search for "threads with only one author from the last
7 days". And people could sweep through that[1].

You already allow date-based searches, so it would really just be adding
the "thread has only one author" search. It's conceptually simple, but
it might be hard to index (because of course it may change as messages
are added to the archive, though any updates are bounded to the set of
threads the new messages are in).

But to be clear, I don't think you have any obligation here. I just
wondered if it might be interesting enough that you would implement it
for fun. :) As far as I'm concerned, if you never implemented another
feature for public-inbox, what you've done already has been a great
service to the community.

-Peff

[1] The obvious thing this lacks compared to my workflow is a way to
    mark threads as "seen" or "not interesting". But that implies
    per-user storage.