[Engineering] Gerrit now automatically adds reviewers

Fri Jan 18 06:57:55 UTC 2019

On Thu, Jan 17, 2019 at 10:52 PM Greg Grossmeier <greg at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Yesterday we (the Release Engineering team) enabled a Gerrit plugin that
> will automatically add reviewers to your changes based on who previously
> has committed changes to the file.
>
>
While I commend the intention, this means I will get pinged for virtually
any change in a couple of very busy repositories.

The amount of noise will prevent me from being able to notice anyone's
review request. I think it's going to be the same for other developers - I
don't want to imagine what the inbox of a long-time mediawiki-core
contributor must look like!

What I fear is that the flood of reviews will make everyone just dull to
notifications, obtaining the exact opposite effect that was intended. I say
this because  I auto added myself to all reviews in operations/puppet[1] in
the past, which resulted in me ignoring all code review requests.

I think a good compromise would be to modify the plugin so that it adds
reviewers automatically, only if you're a new contributor (so you have -
say - less than N patches submitted).

While this gets improved, is there a way to opt-out from the feature
individually or as a project?

Thanks,
Giuseppe

[1] we already have a way to "monitor" all changes to a repository, to a
directory within a repository, or even to individual files, which I was
using extensively. Should we remove that?
-- 
Giuseppe Lavagetto
Principal Site Reliability Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation
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