[Development] Proposal: Allow contributors to +1 sanity review.

[Alan Alpert]

On Wed, Aug 14, 2013 at 5:06 AM, Oswald Buddenhagen
<oswald.buddenhagen at digia.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 12:34:19PM -0700, Alan Alpert wrote:
>> On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 12:12 PM, Oswald Buddenhagen <oswald.buddenhagen at digia.com> wrote:
>> > correctly placed warning sign.
>>[...]
>> If this helps that experience in some small way, then I think it's
>> worth it.
>>
> nonsense.
> any kind of security/safety mechanism causes some friction, so by
> definition your idea of improvement would mean abolishing any kind of
> restrictions. the reality is that it is about trade-offs. having a
> contributor wait a few hours because the reviewer did a stupid mistake
> is a *perfectly* acceptable trade-off to uninformed contributors
> mindlessly overriding the bot just because they can.

We seem to have different value judgement on what trade-offs are
worthwhile. Because we already have the important rule of requiring an
approver's approval, and we trust the approvers to consider the sanity
bot (yes, you are trusting me to do that already ;) ).

The cost of uninformed contributors mindlessly overriding the bot
because they can is the same as uninformed contributors giving +1s on
arbitrary reviews just because they can - and this hasn't bothered me
that much so far.

The alternative can cost more than a few hours. It can lead to a
poorly documented aspect of the process sapping the enthusiasm of
contributors due to delays and confusion*, and if they don't know to
ask any random approver on #qt-labs for approval it could lead to a
lot more delay (because with the divergent timezones, almost a full
day is likely even in the case where the approver realizes there is
something for them to do).

*When Josh emailed the list asking about the process for staging
commits, that was evidence that we had failed him by not providing a
clear enough understanding of how the contribution process works. I
have since updated the relevant wiki page to answer his question, but
I left out details on sanity review until we finish this discussion.
--
Alan Alpert