Open Stack

Perhaps one of the lesser know Gerrit "features" is the ability to overwrite someone else's patchset/review with a new revision. This can be a handy thing for collaboration, or perhaps to make minor edits (spelling fixes for example) to help expedite the review process. Generally I think things are fine and friendly on this front. There are a couple side effect behaviors that can occur.

Things like: Changing the author or adding yourself as a co-author. Changing the original author should almost never happen (I'm not sure that it has). Adding yourself as a co-author is less of an issue, but is also somewhat questionable if for example all you've done is re-worded something or fixed a spelling issue. So long as the original author is in the know here I think it is probably fine to add yourself as a co-author. But making more meaningful changes, even to a commit message should be checked ahead of time so as not to disrupt the intent of the original authors patch IMO. Leaving clear Gerrit feedback on the most recent patchset/commit with a -1 should do just fine in most cases if you would like a meaningful change and aren't closely collaborating (already) on the fix...

It has also come to my attention that co-authoring a patch steals the Launchpad ticket. I believe this is something that we should watch closely (and perhaps fix if we can).

Not trying to point the finger at anyone specifically here. I've probably been guilty of clobbering violations and/or accidental ticket stealing myself. We just need to be careful with these more advanced collaborative coding workflows so as not to step on each others toes.

Dan