PR duty

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Hi folks, I was thinking of the following.

To keep the PR queue trim and in good shape, we'd need at least one 
full-time engineer minding it. I've done that occasionally, and the 
queue size got shorter, but I couldn't do much else during that time.

I was thinking, we can't afford a full-time engineer, and even if we 
did, we'd probably have other important matters for that engineer as 
well. However, what we can afford - and indeed already benefit from - is 
a quantum of time from each of many volunteers. By organizing that time 
better we may be able to get more output. Here's what I'm thinking.

Let's define a "PR duty" role that is one week long for each of a pool 
of volunteers. During that week, the person on PR duty focuses on 
minding github queues - merge trivial PRs, ping authors of old PRs, 
email decision makers for specific items in PRs, etc. Then the week ends 
and the role is handed off to the next person in the pool.

A calendar maintained by an impartial person - maybe we can ask Mike - 
would keep track of everything.

The most obvious candidates for PR duty engineers would be the most 
prolific contributors in the respective repositories.

One question would be how many distinct pools/tracks we should have. 
Presumably someone fluent with phobos is not necessarily fluent with 
dmd. So probably we need at least two tracks:

* dmd
* everything else (druntime, phobos, tools, site)

If there are a dozen of us in each pool, each would be on duty one week 
every three months. Even with eight, we'd be on duty a manageable week 
every other month.

Please share your thoughts.


Thanks,

Andrei