Responding to feedback on the What's cooking report, Junio Hamano said he has for some time operated in an "aggressively accept many things into 'seen'" mode. The result was many "Needs review" topics that nobody was interested in, sitting there for weeks. He said it was not entirely fair to call the experiment a failure, because having topics in 'seen' may have helped others find and review them. Still, he said the project needs a policy for topics that stay unreviewed for long.
An alternative he raised is to queue only topics where, judging by the list's reviews, he can say "Will merge to 'next'?" with confidence. That would shrink 'seen' and spare contributors the friction of having a topic queued and later ejected through no fault of their own.
Phillip Wood said the "Will merge to next?" subject reads as a question to others, whereas it seems to mean Junio will do it unless stopped. He suggested making clear that an ejected topic can be re-added if interest returns, which might ease worries about demotivating contributors. Junio replied that the trailing question mark means he plans to act but wants to be stopped, with an explanation, if that is a bad idea.
Patrick Steinhardt said the state confuses newcomers and should be documented if the states are written down. He considered a more aggressive approach reasonable, since an evicted topic can be queued again. He suggested the same rule as for "Waiting for response".
In other threads Junio has been telling authors he will discard their topics if nobody volunteers to review them in a few weeks, because 'seen' has been crowded with topics gathering dust. The topics named in the day's threads include the line-log -L series, a fetch submodule-error series, an http wwwauth redirect fix, a git-svn build knob, a git-p4 fix, a libsecret credential fix, a format-rev series and a branch --recurse-submodules fix.