If the community keeps our reviews not merged, we
cannot use that as proof of our engagement and quality.
[...]
This doesn't contribute to project health.
Indeed. Looking into Gerrit, we have >1000 commits open for coreboot.
Some of our patches got no attention for over 1.5 years.
Most Gerrit views are sorted by last change date, so often it already helps to rebase to master to bring it in front of reviewers again.
What we are asking is a decision about those patches - if anything is
wrong we will fix that.
That's fair. As said, we have a rather big backlog, and to me that indicates that we should look into ways to reduce that, and keep things actionable (and with clear responsibility who's next: author, reviewer, ...)
There's development going on with Gerrit that should assist that, and there are a few more ideas floating around in a different context that could also help here, but whatever we can improve in infrastructure, we still need to use it.
We believe this is a little bit bigger problem that should be addressed
by coreboot leaders since it reflects the healthiness of the community
and agenda of participating entities.
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