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Update maintainer approval criteria

Chun Du requested to merge cdu1-master-patch-21190 into master

Why is this change being made?

The current maintainership approval requires half of existing maintainers. As the development team grows, we have come a long way and increased maintainers dramatically over various categories, such as Backend, Frontend, etc. With a large number of maintainers, it can be challenging (and possibly unnecessary) to require approvals from half of the existing maintainers, for example there are 53 Backend and 29 Frontend maintainers at the moment and still counting.

Fun fact: The suggestion of half was first introduced on 2018-05-31 in this commit b4528a5b, and it was untouched when this dedicated page was spun off from the engineering home page in this commit 2dfd356b.

This MR proposes an iteration of maintainership approval criteria. It distinguishes the base of existing maintainers -

  1. No change if the base is less than 10 (inclusive) existing maintainers
  2. Requiring a fixed number of 5 approvals where existing maintainers are more than 10

Note: The base size (10) and proposed fixed approvals (5) were randomly chosen and open for suggestions.

Review app link: https://cdu1-master-patch-21190.about.gitlab-review.app/handbook/engineering/workflow/code-review/index.html

Author Checklist

  • Provided a concise title for this Merge Request (MR)
  • Added a description to this MR explaining the reasons for the proposed change, per say why, not just what
    • Copy/paste the Slack conversation to document it for later, or upload screenshots. Verify that no confidential data is added.
  • Assign reviewers for this MR to the correct Directly Responsible Individual/s (DRI)
    • If the DRI for the page/s being updated isn’t immediately clear, then assign it to one of the people listed in the Maintained by section on the page being edited
    • If your manager does not have merge rights, please ask someone to merge it AFTER it has been approved by your manager in #mr-buddies
  • If the changes affect team members, or warrant an announcement in another way, please consider posting an update in #whats-happening-at-gitlab linking to this MR
    • If this is a change that directly impacts the majority of global team members, it should be a candidate for #company-fyi. Please work with internal communications and check the handbook for examples.

Edited by Chun Du

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