Interacting with the Review Bot on Gerrit

By Hossein Nourikhah On 19 May 2022 In Tutorial

Have you received “A polite ping, still working on this bug?” message on one of your Gerrit submissions? You can simply send an arbitrary reply to avoid the patch being abandoned within a month. Here we discuss more about Review bot, which is one of the QA (Quality Assurance) tools for the LibreOffice QA team to manage old submissions.

Interacting with the Review bot

You may have received messages from some bots, including Review bot. This bot checks Gerrit to find the older submissions, and abandon the old ones that no one actively work on them.

If it has been several months after the last change on a submission, the bot adds a comment and asks:

A polite ping, still working on this bug?

Then, you can do one of these things, according to your choice:

1. Reply with whatever you want, and the Review bot will not longer try to abandon your submission. Do this if you want to continue work on the submission.
2. Mark the patch as “work in progress”. This would be helpful if you want to prevent the bot from monitoring the submission.
3. Leave it as is. Then, after 1 month your patch will be automatically abandoned with this message:

Abandoned

Abandoning this for the moment due to inactivity. Be aware it can be reopened anytime if you still want to continue working on it. Do not forget to rebase it first.

Even in this case, you don’t have to worry! As the message says, you can simply click on the RESTORE button on the top right of the page to restore the patch and continue working on it.

Please note that if you have restored an old submission, you have to do a re-base to get the latest changes in the LibreOffice code, pushed while your submission was remaining intact. If there is not a merge conflict, you can do this easily by clicking on the REBASE button on the top right of the page. Otherwise, you have to download the patch and resolve the merge conflict manually.