Re: [gentoo-dev] rfc: [QA] Ban policy introduction

[Dirkjan Ochtman]

On Mon, Jul 30, 2018 at 8:52 AM Guilherme Amadio <amadio@g.o> wrote:

> If you introduce penalties for breaking prefix as well, I'm afraid many
> people will be unnecessarily penalized. I think that such penalties are
> counter productive in most cases. If someone is really being careless it
> might make sense to get some warning and lose commit access temporarily.
> If someone made a simple mistake that can be easily fixed, like version
> bumping a package that starts to fail in some corner case, then
> punishment doesn't make much sense.
>

The proposed policy already mentions that people will only be punished
after two warnings. This seems enough for me -- if people keep breaking
stuff despite warnings, a little penalty is probably a good thing.

The proposed policy already goes out of its way to require two warnings for
"independent" breakage, but it's not entirely clear what independent means
here. If you commit three breakages that are technically unrelated on the
same day, then you probably shouldn't be banned immediately. So I would
suggest also making clear that the warnings should be sent at least a few
days apart and that an initial penalty cannot happen until a few days apart
the second warning.

That said, I agree with those who are saying that breaking things should be
obvious, things like ignoring repoman and/or other CI messaging. If the
breakage is non-obvious and hard to spot locally, then we should instead
invest in tooling to make it more obvious. By "ignoring" here I do mean
that there needs to be a reasonable timeout -- sometimes if I commit a
change and get a CI alert after a few hours, it might be tricky due to
work/family/whatever concerns to fix it within, say, 24 hours.

Regards,

Dirkjan