[coreboot] Changes to the coreboot Project Structure -- the non-aneurysmal way

mrnuke mr.nuke.me at gmail.com
Wed Mar 26 15:22:34 CET 2014


Not so long ago, Stefan announced some pretty drastic changes to the project 
structure. While I believe he wanted to discuss the direction and find a 
mutually agreeable direction, his email still raised the aneurysm level to 
over nine thousand.

So, how about we take the good ideas out of there and start putting them in 
practice. Today, I'll be focusing on the idea of MAINTAINERS. While it's nice 
to jump straight to maintainer trees, that's a long ways away, and I'm not 
even sure we reached consensus on it. Couple that with the changes needed to 
be done to _both_ gerrit configuration, _and_ gerrit workflow, this matter is 
better left for another day.

What we can do, however, is to start assigning maintainership of different 
sub-directories. Two ways to do it:
(i) One big MAINTARES file in top-level directory
(ii) One small MAINTAINER file in each directory with an assigned maintainer
Number (i) is human friendly, while (ii) is parser-friendly (I would hope). 

Now comes the fun part:
For directories with a maintainer, gerrit implements a MMA criteria. That's 
short for "Maintainer Must Approve". People are still welcome to do reviews, 
bikeshed, etc, but the maintainer has veto power. For directories without a 
maintainer, the old workflow applies (no MMA).

This should reduce confusion from conflicting reviews, and definitely reduce 
number of incidents where a patch gets merged with a review from a person who 
is not fully qualified to, well, do the review.

Masters, of Gerrit, the pleasure of training gerrit to implement this change 
is left entirely to you.

Alex



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