Re: Idea for Policy expert reviewer list

[Sam Hartman]

> "Russ" == Russ Allbery  writes:
Russ> What do people think?  Helpful innovation, or just extra
Russ> bookkeeping that isn't worth the effort?  If people do think
Russ> this is a good idea, I'll bring it up on debian-devel for
Russ> further discussion (and then, if we adopted it, it would be a
Russ> debian-devel-announce post).

I think I'd recommend waiting until you get burned a couple times by not
having the review before implementing something like this.
I've watched the expert review process in the IETF become more involved
over the years, and I think it's important to be careful of  against process
complexity increases.  Mind I think the IETF complexity increases may be
justified: the impact of standards errors today is bigger than it was in
2000.
And it may be that we've reached the point to start down that road in
Debian.
But I'd prefer to have concrete things we're accomplishing with a change
like this.  They might look like:

* I'm an expert in foo area, but debian-policy is too much traffic, and
  I'm struggling to keep up

or

* We didn't get enough review and we made a mistake with the bar
  change.  We have experts who would have done the review if asked but
  do not read debian-policy.

--Sam

Re: Idea for Policy expert reviewer list

[Russ Allbery]

Sean Whitton  writes:

> I think this is a nice idea, and could help a lot with our bugs.  I
> think that we should do it in the lightest-weight way that we can.  That
> is, let's

> 1) have the list

> 2) write down in the README that we'll CC people at the point that
>things have got sufficiently concrete, as you say

> 3) announce on d-d-a that we would like people to put themselves on the
>list / ask us to put them on the list.

> Seems to me this could achieve everything you want to achieve without
> introducing any serious bookkeeping work for anyone.  (Additionally, not
> sure why this would need to go to debian-devel -- seems like a Policy
> team-internal thing.)

Yes, good point, I'm not sure why I was thinking that we needed to discuss
it on debian-devel first.

Okay, not sure when I will get around to kicking it off, but I have added
it to my to-do list.

-- 
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)  

Re: Idea for Policy expert reviewer list

[Sean Whitton]

Hello,

On Tue 20 Sep 2022 at 09:39AM -07, Russ Allbery wrote:

> What do people think?  Helpful innovation, or just extra bookkeeping that
> isn't worth the effort?  If people do think this is a good idea, I'll
> bring it up on debian-devel for further discussion (and then, if we
> adopted it, it would be a debian-devel-announce post).

I think this is a nice idea, and could help a lot with our bugs.  I
think that we should do it in the lightest-weight way that we can.  That
is, let's

1) have the list

2) write down in the README that we'll CC people at the point that
   things have got sufficiently concrete, as you say

3) announce on d-d-a that we would like people to put themselves on the
   list / ask us to put them on the list.

Seems to me this could achieve everything you want to achieve without
introducing any serious bookkeeping work for anyone.  (Additionally, not
sure why this would need to go to debian-devel -- seems like a Policy
team-internal thing.)

-- 
Sean Whitton


signature.asc
Description: PGP signature

Idea for Policy expert reviewer list

[Russ Allbery]

I had an idea this morning while working through the Policy backlog and
wanted to see if others think it's worth pursuing.

One of the challenges of some Policy changes is that there can be subtle
nuances that aren't obvious.  We currently rely on the seconding process
to ensure that at least a few people have had eyes on any given change,
but that's at the mercy of whoever happens to be reading debian-policy.
Thankfully, many long-time Debian contributors have been willing to keep
up with the list, but Debian is busy and traffic can be bursty and that
may not always be the best use of their time.

The IETF has a concept of expert review for certain types of changes, and
the Linux kernel and other projects use subsystem maintainers to route
patch reviews to appropriate people.  I'm wondering if Policy would
benefit from a similar sort of concept: maintaining a list of expert
reviewers.

The idea would look something like this:

* We would keep a list of general Policy areas and a corresponding list of
  Debian experts in that area in a file in the debian-policy source
  package (but not part of the binary package or published on the web
  site).  Or we put it in the wiki, but I'm trying to reduce the number of
  places people's email addresses get published for spamming purposes
  (probably futilely).

* If something in that area comes up, the Debian Policy Editors would cc
  the experts in that area once there's a concrete proposal or patch
  that's ready for review.

* Anyone who feels like they have deep expertise in an area of Debian and
  wants to be listed can just ask us and we'll add them.

This wouldn't be a blocking review necessarily, since people are busy and
sometimes there are expert disagreements that we still have to sort out.
But the point would be to make sure the people with the highest-quality
input would have an opportunity to see any change.

Obviously this wouldn't be necessary for areas of Policy work that mostly
correspond to a single package.  In those cases (libc, for example), we
should just copy the package maintainers.  But there are a lot of fuzzier
areas, like bootstrapping, the maintainer script execution model, shared
library dependencies, the Perl policy, debconf, and so forth where I know
there are domain experts in Debian but we don't have a systematic way of
involving them in patch review.

If all those folks are happy to read debian-policy, this is sort of
pointless.  I'm guessing that's not the case, but I don't really know.

Guillem can also decide if he wants to be an expert reviewer on most of
Policy.  :)

What do people think?  Helpful innovation, or just extra bookkeeping that
isn't worth the effort?  If people do think this is a good idea, I'll
bring it up on debian-devel for further discussion (and then, if we
adopted it, it would be a debian-devel-announce post).

-- 
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)