blanket portmgr approval vs. non-fixing changes

[Adam Weinberger]

> On 27 Jun, 2016, at 9:22, Kubilay Kocak <koobs at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> 
> On 28/06/2016 12:25 AM, Adam Weinberger wrote:
>>> On 27 Jun, 2016, at 3:27, Marcelo Araujo <araujobsdport at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 2016-06-27 16:58 GMT+08:00 Matthias Andree
>>> <matthias.andree at tu-dortmund.de>: Am 27.06.2016 um 10:16 schrieb
>>> Mathieu Arnold:
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> +--On 27 juin 2016 16:10:36 +0800 Marcelo Araujo
>>>> <araujobsdport at gmail.com> wrote: | 2016-06-27 16:02 GMT+08:00
>>>> Mathieu Arnold <mat at freebsd.org>: |> | Read here for reference: 
>>>> |> | |>
>>>> https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/porters-handbook/makefile-maintainer
>>>> 
>>>> 
> |> | .html
>>>> |> |> That pages says, exactly the opposite of what you are
>>>> trying to says: |> | | No it doesn't! | | And this is the normal
>>>> workflow: | 1) Port has a maintainer, and it needs update. | 2)
>>>> Open a PR with the patch. | 3) After 2 weeks, and with timeout;
>>>> anybody can commit it. | | | And about the ownership and belong
>>>> to the community, I do believe in that, | that is the basic in a
>>>> legal point of view.
>>>> 
>>>> That page says that the maintainer has to be consulted, except
>>>> for changes covered by the blanket approval, where the change can
>>>> be committed immediately.
>>>> 
>>>> In this case, Sunpoet had every right to commit the thing he did
>>>> without asking or notifying the maintainer.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> TL;DR given at the very end.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 1. Given the portmgr@ rules, that is our current policy, that
>>> portmgr@ as the overseers of the ports system have delegated, by
>>> the blanket approval, part of their ultimate responsibility to the
>>> public.
>>> 
>>> 2. What I was meaning to state was that (and I'll not pick at the
>>> kind soul who has modernized the port) we should only apply the
>>> blanket approval if ports have fallen into disrepair.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 2b. This was not the case with db6, the port wasn't known broken to
>>> me, so why do we permit and encourage going the fast path for
>>> changes that do not /repair/ a port (for instance, if it's not
>>> building, to fix misspellings), and I'm surprised because some two
>>> months ago, it has already gone through a modernization round after
>>> gahr's PR, 
>>> <https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=208740>, that
>>> also combined a feature addition and required a bit more work to
>>> get right, see changesets 415741 and 415743.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 3. What would have been bad about filing a PR in this case?
>>> 
>>> The argument "maintainers aren't doing it" is covered by the
>>> maintainer timeout.  Anything that does not need the fast path
>>> should go through some form of review, most naturally through a PR
>>> filed to the port's maintainer.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 4. Do we need to tighten up the set of required tests a committed
>>> does before committing non-maintainer updates?
>>> 
>>> I'm scratching my head over this one since the failure in r417590
>>> that got remedied in r417595 was rather peculiar, and I'm not sure
>>> if anyone, including myself, would have figured that out.  It might
>>> have slipped through the cracks even if I'd reviewed it.
>>> 
>>> 4b. It's probably better to extend the committer's guide and/or
>>> porter's handbook and have a list of test recommendations where we
>>> list things that trigger a certain test requirement.  I. e. things
>>> to test IN ADDITION to the usual "poudriere testport" or "make
>>> DEVELOPER=yes clean all check-plist package" and portlint coverage.
>>> Meaning that if someone tweaks any of the WRK* and
>>> *DIR/*SRC-related variables, "also test 'make clean extract
>>> do-patch makepatch' on a copy of the port directory" or 
>>> thereabouts.
>>> 
>>> mat@ thanks for all the explanation and time.
>>> 
>>> Unfortunately, I still make things a bit manual at my side, but
>>> usually my testbed is: 1) Portlint. 2) Make and likes on i386 and
>>> amd64(clean vm).
>>> 
>>> I think, include more information about test recommendations is
>>> always good.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> There seem to be at least two distinct camps, in one camp,
>>> maintainers go along Marcelo's and my trains of thought, in the
>>> other, maintainers cherish fast and low-ceremony progress, marino
>>> has argued along these lines, and some other portmgr@ members have
>>> pushed for progress in the past.
>>> 
>>> I don't mean to bikeshed or split up our project here, just refine
>>> our existing policies.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> TL;DR:  I propose:
>>> 
>>> - the blanket approval should be tightened up a bit and encourage
>>> that non-trivial and non-urgent changes go through the PR and
>>> invoke mantainer timeout after the shortest possible period.
>>> 
>>> Personally, I like the first option! And in addition, we have
>>> phabricator as an option too, at least for src, the reviews are
>>> made very quickly. So, could be defined a short timeout, at least
>>> for those that are active and would like to help make a review,
>>> seems something reasonable.
>>> 
>>> Also I do understand about all the modernization and definitely we
>>> need it, maybe 2 days timeout is enough for an active maintainer to
>>> reply that he is busy or he is working on that.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> - we discuss about an assisting set of "change these variables 
>>> foo.*regexp, and you also need to test 'make foo' and 'make bar'"
>>> rules in the form of a concise list.
>> 
>> Maintainership too often means that change requests get ignored for
>> two weeks before they're committed.
>> 
>> Aside from large, complex, interconnected systems, I think that we
>> should do away with ports maintainership entirely. Maintainership
>> serves absolutely no purpose that peer-review wouldn't do better.
> 
> There's two senses of 'ownership' that are often conflated, or at least
> almost never made explicit.
> 
> The kind we want, more of, and would hate to lose:
> 
> - responsibility, accountability, pride in 'looking after' something
> 
> The other we don't:
> 
> - territorial, xenophobic (mine/yours, ours/theirs), hoarding, exclusive use
> 
> Which one we have, get, or foster, has everything to do with how we
> teach people we do things around here, how clearly we articulate our
> goals and intentions, and nothing to do with MAINTAINER intrinsically.
> 
> All: How did you feel the first time you saw your email on a maintainer
> line? That is priceless and shouldn't be confused with the 'bad' kind of
> ownership.

You're a wise man, koobs. What I said was a classic nirvana fallacy. That feeling of seeing my name on a maintainer line is precisely why I contributed to FreeBSD a second time. And you're completely right that there is a difference between owning a toy and being the only one allowed to play with it.

I am a huge fan of the blanket. I'd sent an email to portmgr requesting it shortly before it got announced. So whether or not one had anything to do with the other, I like to pretend that I played a part in its creation. I guess I just don't understand why it really bothers some others.

# Adam


-- 
Adam Weinberger
adamw at adamw.org
http://www.adamw.org