There appears to be some confusion over what the role of a sheriff is
especially when it involves FirefoxOS (B2G and Gaia). For a long time
the Sheriffs, who work in the Automation and Tools Team (A*Team) have
been managing the trunk trees and inbound trees for Gecko in "real time".
Their role is to try keep the trees as green as possible and when there
are intermittentsto star them (just note that this is a known flaky
test). They also spot trends in test suites like a patchthathas
increased the likelihood of an intermittent and will then backout the
offending patch.When they are backing out patches they may close the
tree so that they don't get "pileups" of bad patches. In the Gecko
world, tests can take hours to run due to the complexity of the product,
so pileups can cause a lot of unnecessary work.They are also helpful in
landing patches if a bug has been marked with "checkin-needed" or if
there is a request to uplift patches to Aurora or Beta. They do this by
working extremely closely with the Release Management team making sure
things land where they should.
Unfortunately the term sheriff appears to have been overloaded in the
FirefoxOS world muddying the original meaning of crew within the A*Team.
This has meant that the sheriffs are getting requests for tasks that do
not fall into any of the above buckets.
The main item that is getting confused are requests to do backouts if QA
has found a regression. This is not in the remit of the sheriffs simply
because they lack the context of the patch and therefore can't make the
correct judgement call on backing it out.
Before asking a sheriff to do a backout please make sure you have
approached the following people (starting with the person with most
context to the person with least context):
1. The engineer that landed the patch
2. The reviewer of the patch
3. The module peers for the area that the patch affected
4. The module owner
5. Any B2G developer in your timezone
6. The Sheriffs
The sheriffs are there to help when things are happening straight away,
the longer the patch is in the tree the bigger the chance a backout
could cause more harm, since it's more likely to interact with
subsequently landed patches. To put it another way, sheriffs usually
operate at a repo's head; that's where their expertise lies. They don't
have the necessary context to make decisions about the impacts of
backing out "old" patches.
If anyone has any questions please feel free to email me directly.
David
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