[webkit-dev] OWNERS policy

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Wed, Feb 21, 2018 at 2:52 PM, Don.Olmstead at sony.com wrote:
> One thing we're unclear on is the OWNERS policy. The list itself is 
> pretty small and has no guidance on who might be the right person(s) 
> to assign a bug to when touching shared code. It feels like we're 
> just guessing on reviewers which doesn't seem like it helps anything 
> move along.
> 
> 
> 
> There also seem to be commits that were reviewed by non-owners that 
> are touching common code.
> 
Recently, I approved a change that I should not have (and which 
embarassingly introduced a build failure for Mac). I had thought all 
the changes were platform-specific, but I didn't look closely enough 
and missed a spot. So care is required.

I don't think the rules are written down. We've built up some 
conventions over the years, though. I'd write it as:

 * Either the patch author OR the reviewer must be an owner, OR the 
commit must be acked by an owner on Bugzilla before landing;
 * OR the patch must be entirely platform-specific with zero code 
changes affecting Cocoa ports (#ifdefs in cross-platform files are OK);
 * OR the patch must be a unreviewed build or compiler warning fix;
 * OR the patch author and reviewer should both be @apple.com and both 
really know what they're doing. ;)

The exceptions are why the owners system is working fairly well 
nowadays. It wouldn't work if owners were needed to review 
platform-specific changes.

Anyway, I don't think your problem is the owners system. Looking over 
your patches, the only cross-platform code touched is in WebCore, which 
doesn't have owners. (Only Source/WebKit has owners.) Your problem is 
that Sony doesn't have any reviewers yet. This is a hard threshold to 
cross; everything will be easier once you have one or two reviewers.

Michael