Open Stack

Hi everyone,

This email is being written in the context of Keystone more than any other
project but I strongly believe that other projects could benefit from a
similar evaluation of the policy.

Most projects have a policy that prevents the following scenario (it is a
social policy not enforced by code):

* Employee from Company A writes code
* Other Employee from Company A reviews code
* Third Employee from Company A reviews and approves code.

This policy has a lot of history as to why it was implemented. I am not
going to dive into the depths of this history as that is the past and we
should be looking forward. This type of policy is an actively distrustful
policy. With exception of a few potentially bad actors (again, not going to
point anyone out here), most of the folks in the community who have been
given core status on a project are trusted to make good decisions about
code and code quality. I would hope that any/all of the Cores would also
standup to their management chain if they were asked to "just push code
through" if they didn't sincerely think it was a positive addition to the
code base.

Now within Keystone, we have a fair amount of diversity of core reviewers,
but we each have our specialities and in some cases (notably KeystoneAuth
and even KeystoneClient) getting the required diversity of reviews has
significantly slowed/stagnated a number of reviews.

What I would like us to do is to move to a trustful policy. I can
confidently say that company affiliation means very little to me when I was
PTL and nominating someone for core. We should explore making a change to a
trustful model, and allow for cores (regardless of company affiliation)
review/approve code. I say this since we have clear steps to correct any
abuses of this policy change.

With all that said, here is the proposal I would like to set forth:

1. Code reviews still need 2x Core Reviewers (no change)
2. Code can be developed by a member of the same company as both core
reviewers (and approvers).
3. If the trust that is being given via this new policy is violated, the
code can [if needed], be reverted (we are using git here) and the actors in
question can lose core status (PTL discretion) and the policy can be
changed back to the "distrustful" model described above.

I hope that everyone weighs what it means within the community to start
moving to a trusting-of-our-peers model. I think this would be a net win
and I'm willing to bet that it will remove noticeable roadblocks [and even
make it easier to have an organization work towards stability fixes when
they have the resources dedicated to it].

Thanks for your time reading this.

Regards,
--Morgan
PTL Emeritus, Keystone
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