Hello flashrom community,
This email is about our own gerrit group for flashrom reviewers (people who can approve patches in flashrom tree). The idea has been around and has been discussed in various ways for at least a year, and we decided to go ahead with it some time ago (2 months ago I think). Apologies for the delay, finally this is getting done.
"flashrom reviewers" group will have permissions to approve patches (+2 / -1 permissions). For submit rights, things stay the same as they are now, "flashrom developers" group has permissions to submit patches.
"flashrom reviewers" group will consist of: the whole "flashrom developers" group and all the people who are in flashrom's MAINTAINERS file. There is no script to sync the gerrit group and file, so that will be a human doing that. Which is actually fine.
As a summary why we are doing this, there are few reasons.
People in the MAINTAINERS file agreed to take care of some part(s) of flashrom, and do code reviews (thank you <3), and naturally they should be able to say "yes I approve the patch".
Initial setup was that coreboot reviewers group was used instead (in the absence of flashrom reviewers). However it is really large (>100 people?) and many of them are not working on flashrom and not planning to. Also doesn't work well the other way around: no way to give permissions to someone who works on flashrom, but not on coreboot.
Finally the list of members of those gerrit groups is publicly visible, and therefore is a form of documentation: the list of active code reviewers on flashrom. Coreboot group does not give this information.
As this change also impacts coreboot community, I will also send an email to coreboot ML (not done yet).
Current status. The group was created around a year ago, I picked it from there and added people from the MAINTAINERS file. I need some time to figure out how to wire it in gerrit :) If you have any last moment concerns of being added to the gerrit group, please let me know (by default I assume you agree).
Some people already have approval permissions, so you know the process already.
For those who are new and only had +1 before, here is the advice:
Please read and re-read the development guidelines (https://www.flashrom.org/Development_Guidelines) especially "Patch submission" and "Reviews". Now you need to take care that they are followed, and sometimes educate new contributors ;) Sign-off line is required for every patch.
And also important: remember you are not alone, we are the team. You can always add other reviewers if you think you might need help with the patch.
There is no way to give granular permissions to "approve patches for this one programmer", it's all flashrom or nothing. Use your best judgement and see above (add other people if unsure).
Give me some time to figure out gerrit configs, and I will update the thread when it's done.
Thanks!