gatekeeper emoji?

[Mike Stipicevic]

Hi chromium-dev,

Over two years ago I worked on the gatekeeper auto-open functionality with eseidel@. This opens the tree automatically when bots roll green. In doing so, I found that the auto-open messages were sterile compared to the fun ones sheriffs had put in (shout-out to the Tokyo office!). So I added the gatekeeper_emoji file, and the rest is history.

I received a review today to turn that functionality off. Given that the engineers most affected are Chromium and Blink devs, I felt it proper to ask your opinion on whether you want the auto-generated open messages to include emoji or not.

Thanks, and keep on Chromin'.

- Mike

[Ken Rockot]

Um, definitely not LGTM. Please leave the emoji in place.

[Ken Rockot]

• (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

[Peter Kasting]

The CR discussion includes some good info about the history here, the meaning of the strings involved, etc.  A hearty +1 to the idea of having this info in a page linked from the status or buildbot page so engineers can find out more about why we do this.  With that, I vote to keep this functionality in place.

Context: I've slowly figured some of this background out on my own after wondering repeatedly what the other languages meant and why some of the messages were seemingly strange.  The current state is *potentially* delightful, but to some of us, has been *actually* confusing.

PK

[Dirk Pranke]

On Thu, Nov 10, 2016 at 10:08 AM, Peter Kasting <pkas...@chromium.org> wrote:

The CR discussion includes some good info about the history here, the meaning of the strings involved, etc.  A hearty +1 to the idea of having this info in a page linked from the status or buildbot page so engineers can find out more about why we do this.  With that, I vote to keep this functionality in place.

Context: I've slowly figured some of this background out on my own after wondering repeatedly what the other languages meant and why some of the messages were seemingly strange.  The current state is *potentially* delightful, but to some of us, has been *actually* confusing.

I think that sums up my feelings pretty well also. Some sort of footnote or hyperlink would be a good compromise.

-- Dirk

[Mike Stipicevic]

Having an explainer makes sense to me, especially as the original submission called out that the tree status shows up in unexpected places for someone new to the project. I can imagine someone being confused by 'tree is open' in their codereview tool.

I've filed https://bugs.chromium.org/p/gerrit/issues/detail?id=4914 for polygerrit specifically. I'll file separate bugs for creating the explanation page (the legend on https://chromium-status.appspot.com/status_viewer is the closest we have, I believe) and adding the link in the buildbot waterfall template.

[Dirk Pranke]

I'd be inclined to agree that if it is showing up on gerrit, that's probably bad, but I'd have to see it to be sure.

-- Dirk

[Emil A Eklund]

I can see value in having a *human* sheriff add an emoji or otherwise
express an emotion when opening (or closing) the tree. Having an
automated script randomly append symbols to a generated message though
seems rather pointless to me and I've always found it confusing and
rather juvenile. Clearly I'm in the minority here though.

[Dirk Pranke]

We've had six responses. I'd rate two as pro-machine-emoji, two con, and 

the remaining two as kinda neutral. So I don't think you being in the minority is clear at all ...

-- Dirk 

[dan...@chromium.org]

I like them a lot, they bring a lot of character that's been persistent on this team for years now.

[Adam Rice]

+1 for machine emoji.

[Antoine Labour]

"You can be serious without a suit" - #9 on "Ten things we know to be true" https://www.google.com/about/company/philosophy/ (some principles a lot of folks here aspire to).

I don't think emojis are "unprofessional", so +1 to keeping them. 

Antoine