[webkit-dev] Sunsetting committership and reviewership

[Simon Hausmann]

On Sunday 7. April 2013 18.27.14 Benjamin Poulain wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 6:07 PM, Dirk Schulze <dschulze at adobe.com> wrote:
> > On Apr 7, 2013, at 5:53 PM, Benjamin Poulain <benjamin at webkit.org> wrote:
> > > On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 5:49 PM, Timothy Hatcher <timothy at apple.com>
> > 
> > wrote:
> > > I think 6 months is fine for deactivating SVN accounts. And a full
> > 
> > revoke of reviewer status after 2 years of no activity sounds reasonable
> > to
> > me. We could make it easier to get reviewer status again after a 2 year
> > sunset if the person becomes active again and shows good judgment still.
> > 
> > > +1 to this.
> > > 
> > > I think 2 years to revoke reviewer rights is too long. All the drive-by
> > 
> > reviews that have caused problems were from reviewers that were inactive
> > for less than 2 years. Nevertheless, 2 years is better than the current
> > situation so it is a good start.
> > 
> > The question is still how you measure active reviewers/contributors? Is it
> > enough to comment on bugs? Real reviews? Must there be at least one r+ in
> > this time? Is an actual commit required?
> > 
> > What do we gain from reverting reviewer ship/ committer ship?
> 
> There is a problem of people not contributing for a while, not familiar
> with the current code base, who come and review things for their colleagues.
> There are bad ideas accepted by reviewers who are not very active on the
> project.

And instead of addressing these reviewers directly we are trying to introduce 
a process to automate this, avoid the confrontation, hope that reviewers 
accepting bad ideas today will instead expire in the future.

It appears to me that this approach is based on the assumption that trust 
fades away over time. Naturally this perception may differ from person to 
person.

I have friends from school that I meet maybe once every two years. Oddly I 
still do trust them as much as I did before we went different ways in our life. 
The trust was earned at some point and for me it only changes on a per-
incident basis.


Simon

P.S.: I'm all in favour of locking unused SVN accounts for security reasons, 
similar to how many of us corporate email users have to change our passwords 
every X months.