Gerrit owners plugin coming

[Ed Tanous]

On Wed, Jan 20, 2021 at 11:23 AM Ed Tanous <ed at tanous.net> wrote:
>
> Over the last few weeks, we've been slowly getting the gerrit owners
> plugin deployed and tested, and got the OWNERS files merged into their
> respective meta layers.

These changes are live.  Any commits to the individual meta layers can
now be submitted directly to openbmc/openbmc now.  If there's anything
broken about the new workflow, or anything unexpected happens in your
workflow, please let me know on discord and we'll try to get it
resolved.

I forgot to mention one important improvement:  Listed owners will now
get added to code reviews automatically if any files are changed in
their owned directories, without having to take any action, via the
gerrit-owners-autoassign plugin that we added.  This is also a very
nice quality of life improvement when opening reviews, and something
that tends to trip up developers new to the project when they are
looking for code reviewers.


>
> This has been leading up to a process change that has been on the
> roadmap for some time now.  Once the plugin is enabled (and some other
> housekeeping is done) meta-layer changes will be able to be submitted
> to the normal openbmc/openbmc repository, simplifying one portion of
> our review/merge process.  Submitting to openbmc/openbmc is something
> most newcomers to the project expect, and we've had numerous gerrit
> reviews submitted to the wrong repo in error.  Hopefully, this change
> makes meta-layer changes much more normalized.
>
> Once this goes in, this means that functionally:
> 1. We no longer have a bottleneck on creating new meta-layers,
> renaming meta layers, or moving files between meta layers.  New meta
> layers can be submitted through gerrit similar to any other patchset,
> and will be reviewed with the same process we already have for any
> other type of code, and don't require requesting a new repo in
> advance.
> 2. Changes that require mods to all meta layers (yocto compat fields
> for example) can be done in a single commit, across all systems at
> once, reducing the possibility of breaking builds for meta-layer
> combinations that aren't covered by CI.
> 3. No more waiting for your meta-X changes to get merged into
> mainline, which should reduce the amount of time between recipe bumps
> and the main build reflecting the changes.


>
> Ownership of the various meta-layer folders is still enforced by
> gerrit through the owners plugin using the OWNERS files.  Today, they
> contain the same mapping as the content in the MAINTAINERS files, so
> no files in the repo actually change ownership.
>
> The final review to add the OWNERS file to the root of the repo is here:
> https://gerrit.openbmc-project.xyz/c/openbmc/openbmc/+/39379
> And has already had some discussion and looks to be good to go.
> Assuming there's no other objections, I'd like to get this change made
> on this coming Sunday.
>
> Overall, I hope that this will be a great improvement in the overall
> structure and usability of openbmc, and remove at least one stumbling
> block people new to the project tend to hit.
>
> -Ed