[coreboot] Document for review: coreboot Gerrit Etiquette and Guidelines

[Martin Roth]

Hi Alex,
  Thanks for voicing your concerns.  I do think that most of the
issues you bring up are handled, or aren't as big issues you make them
out to be.  As always, I could be wrong, so I'd again invite others to
give their opinions.  I've tried to address your issues below.

> ... the "maintainer" is given almost absolute veto power
> in all matters relating to that code.
...
> There are also no responsibilities defined for a "maintainer", despite
> such person being given near-inter-stellar of power.
I did try to define maintainers in the document:
* Try to coordinate with platform maintainers when making changes to
  platforms. The platform maintainers are the users who initially pushed the
  code for that platform, as well as users who have made significant changes
  to a platform. To find out who maintains a piece of code, please use
  util/scripts/maintainers.go or refer to the original author of the code in
  git log.
I'm not certain how "Try to coordinate" is being read as "almost
absolute veto power" or "near-inter-stellar of power".

>  Concerns from external reviewers often get
> ignored or brushed off as "don't care".
This is absolutely addressed by these three guidelines:
* Respond to anyone who has taken the time to review your patches.
* If there have been comments or discussion on a patch, verify that the
  comments have been addressed before giving a +2.
* If there is still ongoing discussion to a patch, try to wait for a
conclusion to the discussion before submitting it to the tree.

>  I've seen plenty of cases where patches have been -2'd
> by W at g.com until other @g.com patches were merged, only for the -2 to be
> removed once it was on the contributor to rebase his work.
I haven't seen this, but if you see a situation where you feel like
someone is being treated unfairly, please bring it to the attention of
the coreboot leadership or post something to the mailing list.

> This then creates another significant issue: the bar for contributions
> from such teams is very low, while anyone else experiences a much higher
> bar. This has many times resulted in sub-optimal code being merged, and
> great contributions getting delayed and abandoned.
Again, I feel like if you comment on these patches, the rules above
should handle these issues.  And again, if you feel like something is
unfair, bring attention to it.

> ...  Raptor Eng. was asking around $15000 to upstream ...
> All of a sudden, we've made coreboot a very expensive
> project to support.
Additionally, I specifically reached out to tpearson with these
guidelines to get his feedback before they were posted.  I have tried
to address the concerns he brought up.  If you (or anyone else) feel
like there's something specific we can add here that will help him or
future developers get code submitted, please recommend the addition.

> Then there's talk about a vague "coreboot leadership"...
Patrick addressed this in the review - here's Stefan talking about
coreboot leadership:
http://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2015/05/11/on-coreboot-leadership/