Ideas for adding more reviewers and maintainers for Distribution projects
Problem
This is a dedicated issue for brainstorming "Expand on the counterpart practice and advocate local reviewers and maintainers
of Distribution" from this issue.
Projects in scope
- gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab
- gitlab-org/charts/gitlab
- gitlab-org/build/CNG
- gitlab-org/cloud-native/gitlab-operator
- Any project in gitlab-org/cloud-native/charts subgroup
All other Distribution projects are out of scope in this issue as the level of changes are low.
Findings
- About 1/3-1/2 Distribution MRs are from non-Distribution team members (Source), which is quite unique.
- Distribution projects are in several repos, and likely require different set of knowledge and experience.
- Not all Distribution team members are listed as reviewers/maintainers of our own projects.
- The overall pursuing maintianership process has been updated and simplified. (MR, PPT)
Questions
- The reviewer and maintainer roles are defined in team member profile files per project based, what are the most efficient way for our projects? Per project or skill sets or team scope or anything else?
- How feasible to have a scoped self-serve model in these projects? Even just some codebase. i.e. in Omnibus, there are doc maintainers, can we extend that to app maintainers to manage application configuration E2E?
Proposal
(Details to be updated based on the outcome of above and any other potential questions and discussion)
Now
-
1. Update all distribution team members profile to include all of our projects (minimally reviewer), so we can get accurate metrics, and then it could be used by any automation in the future. - Update Distribution team members profiles (gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com!122916 - merged)
FY24Q2
- Investigate how to improve reviewer and maintainer experience and implement quick wins - FY24Q2 Improve Distribution projects reviewer a... (gitlab-org&10338 - closed)
- Danger bot could be a good candidate for automation
- Optimize and add
project maintainer process for <Distribution projects>
to the engineering code review handbook page - FY24Q2 add project maintainer process for Distr... (gitlab-org&10339 - closed) - All senior+ engineers become maintainer of one more project per expectation if feasible - FY24Q2 All senior+ engineers become maintainer ... (#1249)
- Identify issue candidates for potential maintainer to pursue maintainership - FY24Q2 Identify issue candidates for potential ... (#1250 - closed)
- Engage Distribution stable counterparts - FY24Q2 Engage Distribution stable counterparts (#1251 - closed)
- Engage top non-Distribution contributors and groups - Engage top non-Distribution contributors and g... (#1252)
- Define Scoped maintainership - Define Scoped maintainership (#1253 - closed)
- Any other ideas based on brainstorming outcome and capacity
FY24Q3+
- Define and complete scoped self-serve model for all Distribution projects where feasible
- Evaluate how to engage community contributors for reviewing
Process draft
This is a section to capture potential process.
Scoped maintainership
This idea has been discussed in Add decision making page regarding project lead... (gitlab-org/charts/gitlab!2737 - merged). A potential list of scopes:
- Doc (All documentation in a repo)
- GitLab application doc
- Process doc
- others
- Application (All application specific/related codebase in a Distribution project)
- CICD (Reference)
- Architecture (Example)
- Distribution (Anything else that directly owned by Distribution groups)
Reference
Edited by Peter Lu