[webkit-dev] Sunsetting committership and reviewership

Filip Pizlo fpizlo at apple.com
Wed Apr 10 00:41:21 PDT 2013


I don't know if this is in line with what you and Dmitry were thinking, but here's what I like about a symbolic "emeritus" status: it takes care of the possible drive-by review problem while also continuing to recognize the person within the project.  It's symbolic, and it feels nicer than just wiping them from the system.

The fact that it serves the purpose of supporting lookup (your point (2)) is good, also.

-Filip


On Apr 10, 2013, at 12:37 AM, Eric Seidel <eric at webkit.org> wrote:

> Unrelated to Dmitry's suggestion, but since I brought up "emeritus
> contributors" earlier in the thread, I should explain my usage.  The
> "emeritus" class proposed in the ancient webkit-reviewers thread about
> sunsetting was simply to answer the fact that committers.py has two
> purposes:
> 
> 1. It exists as a public Access Control List (ACL) for svn.webkit.org
> (since I know of no other public ACL).
> 2. It exists as a way for our tools to lookup Contributor objects
> based on name, irc nick, svn email etc.
> 
> "emeritus" contributors (in my original proposal on webkit-reviewers
> years ago) only exist to serve the second purpose, not the first.
> This would be similar to the "Contributor" and "Account" superclasses
> which have (since that old thread) been added to committers.py to
> allow committers.py to list non-commiters and even bots which we might
> want to have in our CC list, but not give any privileges to.
> 
> Again, my thoughts on this may bear no reflection to what Dmitry had
> in mind with his use of the word "emeritus", so I should let him
> speak!
> 
> On Tue, Apr 9, 2013 at 11:39 PM, Filip Pizlo <fpizlo at apple.com> wrote:
>> Interesting.  What privileges, if any, would you propose 'emeritus
>> reviewers' to have?
>> 
>> -Filip
>> 
>> 
>> On Apr 9, 2013, at 2:54 PM, Dmitry Titov <dimich at chromium.org> wrote:
>> 
>> How about creating an 'emeritus reviewer' status (no r+ power) and let
>> people *voluntarily* move themselves to this status? I bet a lot of
>> 'inactive reviewers' would do that, since everybody understands the issue of
>> getting out of sync with current code base. It may have different vibe
>> though than figuring some automatic time-based enforcement system...
>> 
>> As an added bonus, this gives such people a good way to avoid being asked to
>> "review a patch for a colleague" while keeping some ties with the project...
>> 
>> 
>> On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 3:34 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.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.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> We sometimes get low-quality drive-by reviews even from people who are
>>> active at the time. I feel like that's not the right basis for the time
>>> cutoff. If we do have a sunset period, we should think about it in terms of
>>> how long it takes to be so out of touch with the current state of the
>>> project that there's little chance you can give a useful review.
>>> 
>>> Regards,
>>> Maciej
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> webkit-dev mailing list
>>> webkit-dev at lists.webkit.org
>>> https://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo/webkit-dev
>>> 
>> 
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