PSA: Sheriffing Over the Holidays

[Alex Keybl]

This is a PSA. Due to very light sheriff coverage over the holidays, please:

* Note that in the next day, mozilla-inbound will be temporarily shut down for the holidays, and landings must go directly to mozilla-central
* Please make sure to follow https://wiki.mozilla.org/Tree_Rules when landing to any pre-release branch
* That means appropriately changing the associated bug, watching your check-in, starring failures, and not landing on top of failures

Please let us know if you have any questions!

-Alex

[Gavin Sharp]

On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 11:47 AM, Alex Keybl <ake...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> * Note that in the next day, mozilla-inbound will be temporarily shut down
> for the holidays, and landings must go directly to mozilla-central
>

This feels counter-intuitive to me. If sheriff coverage will be light,
shutting down inbound seems more likely to result in tree trouble on
mozilla-central. Keeping inbound open (with less frequent, or even no
merges to central) seems like the better choice.

Gavin

[Ralph Giles]

On 12-12-21 8:47 AM, Alex Keybl wrote:

> * That means appropriately ... starring failures

How does starring happen, and what does it actually mean? This has
always been mysterious to me.


-r

[Gavin Sharp]

http://ehsanakhgari.org/blog/2010-04-09/assisted-starring-oranges goes into
some detail. It's really not ideal that we have no "official" documentation
about it (at least not that I could find). Historically, it's a rather
important responsibility associated with committing code, but I guess the
existence of inbound has isolated people from having to learn these things.

Gavin

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[Benjamin Smedberg]

Philor convinced me on IRC: if there are no sheriffs, then people will
keep pushing to -inbound without regard for whether it is currently in
good shape or not. This means that the most likely outcome is that we'll
have to back out everything on -inbound. It would be better if only the
people who have time to watch the tree land, and then they should just
do that on -central.

--BDS

[Ralph Giles]

On 12-12-21 8:59 AM, Gavin Sharp wrote:
> http://ehsanakhgari.org/blog/2010-04-09/assisted-starring-oranges goes
> into some detail. It's really not ideal that we have no "official"
> documentation about it (at least not that I could find). Historically,
> it's a rather important responsibility associated with committing code,
> but I guess the existence of inbound has isolated people from having to
> learn these things.

I see, thanks.

It turns out this is documented in
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Developer_Guide/Committing_Rules_and_Responsibilities#Dealing_with_test_failures.
I've added a link to ehsan's post, which should make the text stand out
a bit better if nothing else.

-r

[L. David Baron]

There's a big distinction here, though, between checking that the
tree is in ok shape before landing (takes less than a minute if
things are in good shape, more if they aren't and you want to fix
it) and watching the tree for hours after landing.

We need the first, but we don't need the second.

Perhaps an alternative would be to keep inbound open but require
that people check that it's ok before landing?

-David

--
𝄞 L. David Baron http://dbaron.org/ 𝄂
𝄢 Mozilla http://www.mozilla.org/ 𝄂

[Gavin Sharp]

The holidays will presumably mean that we have a lower check-in volume
overall, and therefore a much lower risk of things getting out of hand. I
think we should only close inbound if we find evidence of a problem. I'll
be around during the holidays, I will gladly volunteer to keep an eye on
the state of inbound daily and close it if anything looks disastrous.

Gavin


On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 12:12 PM, Benjamin Smedberg
<benj...@smedbergs.us>wrote:

> On 12/21/2012 11:56 AM, Gavin Sharp wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 11:47 AM, Alex Keybl <ake...@mozilla.com> wrote:
>>
>> * Note that in the next day, mozilla-inbound will be temporarily shut
>>> down
>>> for the holidays, and landings must go directly to mozilla-central
>>>
>>> This feels counter-intuitive to me. If sheriff coverage will be light,
>> shutting down inbound seems more likely to result in tree trouble on
>> mozilla-central. Keeping inbound open (with less frequent, or even no
>> merges to central) seems like the better choice.
>>
> Philor convinced me on IRC: if there are no sheriffs, then people will
> keep pushing to -inbound without regard for whether it is currently in good
> shape or not. This means that the most likely outcome is that we'll have to
> back out everything on -inbound. It would be better if only the people who
> have time to watch the tree land, and then they should just do that on
> -central.
>

> --BDS
>
>
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>

[Ed Morley]

----- Original Message -----
> This feels counter-intuitive to me. If sheriff coverage will be
> light,
> shutting down inbound seems more likely to result in tree trouble on
> mozilla-central. Keeping inbound open (with less frequent, or even no
> merges to central) seems like the better choice.
>

> Gavin

Alex included that at my request :-)

People push to inbound without checking to see if it is broken, without watching their pushes and without starring them (which is obviously part of the deal :-)). We have zero sheriff coverage from tomorrow since I am on PTO (and without connectivity) and of our two awesome sheriff volunteers: one has been recovering from an injury for the last 2-3 weeks (and will be for a fair bit longer) and the other is on away on holiday from today until the new year.

This means there will be no-one closing the tree, performing backouts (given of late seemingly 10-30% of inbound landings break the tree) or merging. The lack of merges alone will mean awful conflicts come 2nd January (which is when I'm back) - and also breaks the dev expectation of expedient merges and thus changes being dogfoodable in Nightly ready for branch approval requests.

By closing mozilla-inbound and directing people to mozilla-central, we:
* reach those who don't read the newsgroups and/or look at channel topics, and would otherwise just push to inbound without checking TBPL/IRC/...
* make it clear that the expectations post-push have changed, given that mozilla-central is still subject to the normal tree rules
* avoid the lack of merge issues above

As such, I don't really feel we have any other option but to close inbound.

Regarding people not knowing how to star - I think we really need to start making this a requirement of gaining level 3 commit access (or at least the dev new-hire process). The documentation definitely needs some work - but at this point it may be best to wait until TBPLv2.

Hope everyone has a relaxing holiday :-)

Best wishes,

Ed

[Gavin Sharp]

mbrubeck, jdm, and I are all going to be around during the holidays, and
have offered to help with sheriff responsibilities. I think that's
sufficient coverage, given the lower-than-usual expected traffic, and we
can always revert to the "close inbound" plan if we see the need.

Gavin

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> dev-planning mailing list
> dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-planning
>

[Alex Keybl]

Coverage is even better! Thanks all.

-Alex

[Jonathan Kew]

On 21/12/12 16:47, Alex Keybl wrote:
> This is a PSA. Due to very light sheriff coverage over the holidays, please:
>

> * Note that in the next day, mozilla-inbound will be temporarily shut down for the holidays, and landings must go directly to mozilla-central

> * Please make sure to follow https://wiki.mozilla.org/Tree_Rules when landing to any pre-release branch
> * That means appropriately changing the associated bug, watching your check-in, starring failures, and not landing on top of failures

Maybe it's just me, but when I read "any pre-release branch" here, I
thought in terms of branches like -aurora and -beta; after all,
mozilla-central isn't a branch, it's the trunk.

Perhaps it's worth emphasizing that those Tree Rules apply to m-c itself
every bit as much as the branches. Landing there entails a level of
responsibility for the overall health of the tree that many of us have
cheerfully ignored since the advent of inbound.

JK

[Ryan VanderMeulen]

On 12/21/2012 1:09 PM, Gavin Sharp wrote:
> mbrubeck, jdm, and I are all going to be around during the holidays, and
> have offered to help with sheriff responsibilities. I think that's
> sufficient coverage, given the lower-than-usual expected traffic, and we
> can always revert to the "close inbound" plan if we see the need.
>
> Gavin

In that case, can we please stop landing on m-c again? Looks like
patches are landing on both right now. FWIW, my availability to watch
the tree (and do b2g uplifts) will be limited for the next few days. I
should be around more in the latter part of next week.

Have a happy holidays everyone!

-Ryan

[Hubert Figuière]

On 21/12/12 11:47 AM, Alex Keybl wrote:
> * Note that in the next day, mozilla-inbound will be temporarily shut down for the holidays, and landings must go directly to mozilla-central

Please define in term of dates with "for the holidays" mean. Thanks.

Hub

[Gavin Sharp]

There is no precise definition, "the holidays" are roughly from today to
January 1st/2nd. But as mentioned later in the thread, we decided not to
close inbound after all.

Gavin