Cleaning up old changes on Gerrit

[Jean-Baptiste Queru]

In the next few days, I'll start cleaning up old changes from Gerrit,
i.e. I'll abandon all platform changes that haven't had any activity
this year.

Those changes have been inactive since at least last August, and
they're potentially missing some data that we lost when Gerrit
disappeared last year. Also, those changes were made on top of
Gingerbread, and they're usually very challenging to merge into
Google's internal master branch which is 4 releases ahead.

If I abandon one of your changes which you think is still relevant
(it's very possible), don't hesitate to restore it (and if you have
difficulty restoring a change, send me a direct email).

JBQ

--
Jean-Baptiste M. "JBQ" Queru
Software Engineer, Android Open-Source Project, Google.

Questions sent directly to me that have no reason for being private
will likely get ignored or forwarded to a public forum with no further
warning.

[Jean-Baptiste Queru]

The biggest part of the cleanup is now done. This was a necessary step
toward getting back to normal Gerrit operations in AOSP, as it'll let
everyone focus on changes that have a good chance of getting accepted.

We're now down to about 400 open platform contributions on the main
AOSP track. About 80% of those have been looked at at least once in
the last 2 weeks. Things are looking up.

I estimate that after close examination we might abandon a few more
changes and get closer to 300 open contributions. For comparison, our
experience at the end of 2010 showed that when things are going
smoothly the number of open contributions oscillates between 200 and
250. I hope to get there in about 2 months, but this will depend on
how quickly we can get all our automation running again.

I'm sorry about the changes that we had to abandon. We've worked hard
to eliminate the root causes that got us there, so this isn't likely
to have to happen again.

I'm looking forward to seeing more contributions flow in.

JBQ