Hello Everyone, First of all let's summarize what has happened. Today is May 12.
Two months ago (Mar 6) Nico started this thread on the mailing list: "Gatekeeping, ACLs and Review Rules". I recommend everyone [who is interested] re-read the opening email in this thread. It is well written, analyses existing issues on flashrom project, gives historical information, suggests solutions and rationale behind the solutions. There are several ideas, among them the idea to create a "flashrom reviewers" group in gerrit. The group gives rights to +2 patches (but does not give submit rights). The thread has been active for two months, and various people joined the discussion. People either supported the idea of the "flashrom reviewers" group, or did not comment / did not object. After two months, the topic was raised and discussed at the dev meeting (May 5). "flashrom reviewers" group was approved by all attendees. We made a decision to create this group, and documented the decision (see Meeting notes, Decision summary at 5th May 2022 https://docs.google.com/document/d/18qKvEbfPszjsJJGJhwi8kRVDUG3GZkADzQSH6WFsKqw/edit?usp=sharing ). Just to be clear, Nico was present at the meeting on 5th May. Few hours after the meeting (that was still 5th May), we sent an email with meeting notes, https://mail.coreboot.org/hyperkitty/list/flashrom@flashrom.org/thread/VGTQITWML2DQB7U52OVC7NDDHPOHJYJ5/ Email contains meeting notes in full, and if someone is busy and has no time to read notes in full, there is "Decision Summary" at the top. Next day, 6th May I posted to this thread, once again announcing that we made the decision to create "flashrom reviewers" group and asked Martin to help. He really helped and created a patch https://review.coreboot.org/c/flashrom/+/64101 . The patch is under review, it has some comments. So I want to confirm that all steps for discussion and decision were done properly and publicly. Secondly, let's summarize the issues solved by the "flashrom reviewers" group and next goals. In the absence of "flashrom reviewers", everyone in "coreboot reviewers" has rights to +2 flashrom patches. "coreboot reviewers" is a large group, not all people know flashrom code well, not all people work on flashrom. Which leads to repeated complaints like "Why was this patch merged? It wasn't properly reviewed!" Mostly Nico complained about that, so not surprisingly he described the issue and suggested the solution (see the opening email in the thread). Another point, having our own group makes it much more clear for patch owners on what the expectations are. A reviewer who has +2 right has enough experience on flashrom and can approve the patch. If a reviewer only says +1 this means someone else needs to approve, or patch needs more work. What is the initial list of people in the group? Thankfully, Nico has a good and reasonable suggestion in the first email, too: > Changing this would imply that we need our own group of reviewers. > With this, a +2 would become both rarer and stronger. > If this idea meets some consent, I > would propose to copy the "flashrom developers" group for a start. > And when we identify somebody over time who shows in-depth knowledge > about at least a part of flashrom and good self-judgement if they > are experienced enough for a +2, we could add them. Right now, some > candidates come to mind already, Peter, Nikolai, and Thomas. The very important next goal to discuss: the rules and criteria on how to add new people into the "flashrom reviewers" group. We could not enforce any rules on coreboot reviewers, but now once we have our own group, we can have our own rules. Similarly, "flashrom developers" group has no rules defined. We should discuss this too. Great thing is that now flashrom has a place where core devs and active members of the community can make decisions: we have a meeting! Mailing list and IRC channel have been here since forever, they are good for discussions but don’t work for making decisions. A project needs a place where decisions can be made. And one more thing, I noticed there are some incorrect statements on this thread. I am sure this was not intentional, very likely just emotional, but still I want things to be very very clear. > That change[1] is mostly unrelated to what was discussed This is not true. The patch https://review.coreboot.org/c/flashrom/+/64101 is modifying gerrit config and adding "flashrom reviewers" group, which is exactly what was discussed. However, the patch is doing two things in one, so I added a comment and asked if it is technically possible to split. > IIRC, we decided (first meeting?) to keep using the mailing list for decisions This is not true. Decisions summary for the first meeting has one item: "Will make this meeting bi-weekly until we've worked our way through the issues listed here." I checked the decision summary for all the meetings we had to that time, none of them said we "keep using the mailing list for decisions". > the attendees <...> is a kind of a random selection of people This is not true. The attendees of the meeting are active members of the flashrom community, who are deeply interested to discuss and solve current issues and improve the project. People who invest a lot of their time into flashrom project. This one, I am actually not sure whether it is an incorrect statement or an insult. Again, most likely unintentional… but it would be great to have some kind of “sorry”. -- Anastasia. _______________________________________________ flashrom mailing list -- flashrom@flashrom.org To unsubscribe send an email to flashrom-le...@flashrom.org
