Re: [BuildStream] Proposal: spreading responsibility and maintainership [Was: 1.4 Release timeline]

[Laurence Urhegyi <laurence urhegyi codethink co uk>]

On 2018-12-12 10:06, Tristan Van Berkom wrote:
> Essentially my concern is about accountability; it's very easy for
> someone to throw out there that they "Approve" something if they are
> not on the line for merging it, and multiple "Approvals" don't
> necessarily mean someone has reviewed it thoroughly and really is
> confident enough to hit "Merge".
>
> The way you seem to have it setup in BuildGrid, where only one approval
> is required, the approval would *be* the review, and the merge is not a
> consequence of a mob, but of a single reviewer who assumes full
> accountability for the review, which is better I think.

I understand this concern, of course.

It boils down to trust. By hand picking the list of approvers we trust 
them to be qualified to do the review and only apply an approval when 
they really feel the patch is good (I have a patch in BuildStream, but I 
should not be approving patches for a refactoring of the scheduler, for 
example :)) And of course people we trust to be a responsible 
contributor: eg. be involved in a post-mortem of the patch if something 
transpires to have broken because of it, and help identify where that 
issue lies, etc etc (not a blame game, of course:)).

I think our list of trusted committers (as per the subversion policy) 
should be the same the list as our approvers on gitlab.

Cheers,
Laurence