Currently bear and I share the burden of watching Tinderbox and
everything related to keep it going. It's not hard, but it consumes some
time and is prone to interrupting your routine, making it hard to
concentrate on stuff like, well, like programming :)

At Netscape we had the build sheriff be a rotating duty. One person
would be designated the sheriff of the day, and it worked well. So I
would like to propose it for us as well. I think it would mean you'd
have build sheriff duties maybe one day a month, which shouldn't be too
big a burden on anyone.

Here's what the sheriff would be required to do:

* Make sure all Tinderboxes are running and reporting results. This
involves checkin that the tree is green, that all the columns that are
supposed to be there are there, and that there are recent results in all
columns.
* Make sure people are following checkin policies. I.e., right now only
blockers and docs get checked in on the branch, all checkins have sane
comments etc. In case of errors, be ready to ask committer to back out
or do it yourself, or in some cases send clarifications to dev etc.
* If there is orange, investigate what caused it and make sure it gets
followed up. If it seems it was caused by a recent checkin, make sure
the person who checked in the suspect time period are on it. If it is
intermittent, make sure there is a bug filed on it.
* If the tree goes red, check if it was caused by a checkin. If it was,
make sure that the suspect people are on it. If it doesn't seem to get
fixed in a day, get it backed out.
* Add messages to all issues on the Tinderbox notice board (the little
stars).
* Monitor performance results, and make sure regressions get followed up
(file bug, etc.)
* In case there are issues that would require restarting Tinderbox
clients, kill hung tests etc. contact bear to let him know about the
problem so that bear can fix it. The sheriff is not expected to do this
himself/herself.

The benefit of this would of course be that we would spread the load of
maintaining and working with Tinderbox, and also make all the people who
participate in the sheriff program to become more knowledgeable about
Tinderbox and how you can diagnose problems with it.

Thoughts? Anyone absolutely opposed to participating? If so, why? Other
ideas?

-- 
  Heikki Toivonen

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