[QGIS-Developer] A plea: more volunteers needed for reviewing backports

[Nyall Dawson]

Hi list,

This is a public plea for more developers who are very familiar with
different parts of the QGIS codebase to become actively involved in
backport PR management.

We NEED more people to be actively (i.e. daily) monitoring for
backport PRs and then reviewing them if the backport affects code
areas which they're knowledgeable about.

Right now there's like... 2... of us doing this on a daily basis, and
we need more hands and eyes. Regressions are fixed by backports, but
they can also be introduced by backports. If we don't get more people
involved in this part of QGIS' maintenance then the stability of the
patch releases is compromised.

While I'm more than happy to keep reviewing backports which touch
areas of code I know well, we have a whole stack of backports for
server fixes, relation fixes, and other parts of QGIS I don't know
well enough to risk release stability by reviewing myself. These
backports are currently sitting in the queue for weeks without review,
and often they stale out and are closed without ever getting merged.

I've also a ton of backports for fixes that I make on a daily basis
which I cannot self review, so the PR queue gets flooded with my
backports until I actively pester/harass others to review and approve.

The truth is that the longer the PR queue, the more it stresses me out
and the less motivation I have to review the incoming feature PRs. We
have many older feature PRs which are stalled and waiting review for
months or longer, just because I'm so flooded with managing newer
incoming PRs that I never have time to review the older ones...

So please, if you know parts of the QGIS code well, and can spare 15
minutes a day to looking over the backport queue and approving any
backports you are confident are regression free, then please get
involved! (or ask your employer to officially allocate you this 15
minutes/day as a way of them supporting QGIS!)

Nyall