Sunday, August 6, 2017

For the past couple of weeks I've been focusing on changes that mainly benefit AppDB admins, specifically the management of maintainers.

One of the first problems I fixed when I began this internship was with the interface for managing maintainers. In addition to fixing the sort order to something that made sense to humans (the original order was by userId, and appeared random), I also added a column to display the last time the maintainer had logged into the AppDB. I suspected that we had many maintainers who hadn't logged in in a long time, and the actual number proved even worse than I had feared: 57% of the maintainerships belonged to a user who hadn't logged in in over two years. (Note the number is for maintainerships, not users, as one user may have multiple maintainerships.)

How did this happen? The function that notifies maintainers of new test reports in their queue also sends two  reminders, and removes the maintainership if they fail to process the queued reports after 7 days. That worked well for widely-used programs, but the AppDB has many entries for less-popular programs. Those were the maintainers falling through the cracks: since they weren't getting submitted test reports, and nothing was checking to see if they were submitting their own (which they are supposed to do), they were never removed.

About a month ago I removed the inactive user check, and in the process of studying that code, discovered that it was supposed to also remove maintainerships from users who had not logged in in six months. It never worked, because the check was only run against users who did not have data associated with their accounts, and being a maintainer was defined as having data. So the check was looking for maintainers in an array that had explicitly excluded them.

With all that in mind, I added a control to identify and delete maintainers who had not logged in in over 24 months to the admin control center. I eventually plan to add it to the daily cleanup cron script. The time period, IMO, is still overly generous; I selected it in part because of the large backlog of maintainerships that were going to be removed the first time it was run (3439 out of 6242), and in part because no time limit had ever been enforced before and I wanted to make it exceedingly difficult for anyone to argue that the definition of "inactive" was unreasonable. I may eventually shorten the time period to 18 or even 12 months.




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