Reviewing the process for giving people commit rights

Nicolás Alvarez nicolas.alvarez at gmail.com
Fri Apr 1 18:17:47 BST 2022


El vie, 1 abr 2022 a la(s) 12:29, Nate Graham (nate at kde.org) escribió:
>
> Hello folks,
>
> When someone is proposed to get commit access, currently a sponsor
> proposes it, the intended recipient contacts sysadmin, sysadmin reviews,
> and then asks the sponsor if it's okay. This process essentially only
> allows for sysadmin review, since the sponsor has already implicitly
> approved by virtue of being the sponsor.
>
> This caused a problem recently in KWin. A new contributor was given
> commit rights very soon after he appeared, and then immediately after
> that, he inappropriately merged a not-fully-reviewed an un-accepted
> merge request
> (https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/1980). It seems
> that he did not have a sense of the cultural norms around committing to
> KDE repos, and giving him commit access was probably premature.
>
> I'd like to propose that we need to make the commit access review
> process open to review by more people so that we can flag issues like
> this sooner. Maybe kde-core-devel?

I would like to add that GitLab has made it *significantly* easier to
contribute without commit access. Think about what it was like in
Phabricator era (or even Reviewboard). Apart from the well known UX
issues with submitting reviews and the arc tool, once something was
approved, the author had to explicitly say they didn't have access,
the approver had to manually grab the diff and commit it with the
right author info, etc. Sometimes the reviewer would approve and wait
for the author to commit it (without knowing they didn't have commit
access) while the author waited for something to happen not knowing
what was the next step.

Now the author can just push to a fork and the reviewer can just click
Merge. For a casual contributor, they could well continue submitting
GitLab review requests forever, rather than this being necessarily a
path towards being granted commit access in the future.

Given that, if we have other reasons to change the process of granting
commit access, I don't think it would be a significant barrier to
contributions. I'm not necessarily *advocating* that we add more
restrictions to granting commit access, I just want to point out that
if we have to, we can now *afford* to do so. I don't think we could
before GitLab.

-- 
Nicolás
KDE Sysadmin Team


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