how many patches can we review?

[Graham Percival]

We're up to 59 patches now, plus 17 patches on the "plz review; no
known problems" list.  We're losing ground quickly, and this will
soon become a serious problem for developers and contributors (if
it isn't already).

This is not an official proposal, so don't worry about trying to
"get it right".  If we try something and it sucks, we can change
it instantly.


I see three options, none of which fill me with joy.

1) encourage more pushing without reviews.

2) assign certain people to be in charge of certain areas (e.g.
Carl has final say over anything beaming-related), and encourage
that person to review+push patches in his area ASAP.

3) double or triple the rate of patches in the countdown.


Out of those options, I dislike #3 the least.  I'm thinking of
having 10 patches per countdown, 48 hours for each countdown.  I
know that's a lot of reviewing, but if we want to keep the
opportunity for reviews, that's the kind of workload we need to
handle.

It may be a bit worse right now due to people in academia having
less to do in August instead of September/October (when the
academic year begins in the northern hemisphere)... but I'd really
like to be able to tell people that their patch will get onto a
countdown within at least a week.  In order to do that, we need to
get through a lot of backlog first.

Cheers,
- Graham