Open Stack

On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 9:42 AM, Morgan Fainberg <morgan.fainberg at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
>


I happen to disagree with it in the general case. Developers, even cores or
especially cores, can be subject to political and career pressure to get
changes merged. Some employees are judged by managers on the number of
commits/features they land. This puts pressure on them to push things
through. I hope this is the exception, but I think it does happen. Part of
being a core is wielding influence, soft power in other words; it's not
unreasonable to expect a core reviewer to be able to get a +2 from someone
outside their company. That's my opinion on the general case.

In the specific case of a project like puppet-openstack, we are not a large
team of reviewers and so although we generally try our best to avoid having
+2s from the same company or merging each other's work, it does sometimes
happen. We still strive to have at least one +2 from someone outside our
company. So I think some projects are already doing this (we are) but it
requires a strong PTL who is willing to call out abuse and an understanding
amongst the cores about what the social policy is.

So on a project-by-project basis I think rules may already be bent/modified
by the teams. I'm not sure if they're codified anywhere other than just
known as an expectation.
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