Default reviewer for Ubuntu merge proposals?

[James Westby]

Hi,

I have a problem where the correct answer isn't immediately obvious
to me, so I would like to run my proposed answer past the experts to
see if I am missing something. I've discussed this with many people
over the last year, with no better solution being presented.

When you create a merge proposal in LP for Bazaar branches you are
invited to name the person or team you wish to review the change.
Sometimes you will know that you want someone in particular to
review it, so you can search for them and choose them easily.

However, you may just want somebody to review it, without having
anyone in particular in mind, notably when requesting sponsorship.
In these cases you need to pick a team. We currently use the sponsors
team for this with bug reports. This is one of the things that archive
reorganisation may require changing.

Merge proposals have one thing going for them that bugs for sponsorship
do not: they provide a default for you. This means that as long as you
know that you can get a change in by proposing a merge, you don't need
to know the rest of the details, such as the existence of sponsorship
teams. In theory at least, as our process doesn't currently quite fit
with this model.

Therefore I would like to choose a team to make the default (remembering
it can always be changed if the contributor wishes), and possibly to
tweak our processes slightly to make it work.

The team that we choose will:

  * receive a notification when the review is requested (and presumably
    be subscribed to the proposal). If a contact address is set then that
    will be used, so this wouldn't have be another vector for large amounts
    of email. You could subscribe to the list for all messages, or particular
    branches for things you are interested in.
  * have the reviews show up as reviews to be done on their +activereviews
    page.
  * not be required to actually review everything.

In addition:

  * anyone can review, whether they are the part of the team or not.
  * ability to land the change will be dependent on upload right, regardless
    of what the team is.

Therefore, I propose that ~ubuntu-dev be made the default reviewer for all
branches. This would mean that

  * our team policies mean that anyone who can upload the change will be a
    member of ~ubuntu-dev and so will be able to review on behalf of that
    team.
  * others who can't upload that particular change can also review on behalf
    of the team. As they can't land this isn't too important, except that
    it would no longer be something that ~ubuntu-dev was expected to review,
    and so if we used that list as the sponsorship queue we would miss some
    things. I don't see this as a problem for two reasons:
    - we can make it clear that you shouldn't take the ~ubuntu-dev review
      if you can't upload the change. (I believe LP supports this.)
    - Not using the ~ubuntu-dev to-review list as our sponsorship queue.
  * we should set a contact address for ~ubuntu-dev so that direct members
    don't get all merge proposal email. I would suggest somehow routing this
    to ubuntu-reviews at .

It would be possible to change the default for specific branches, but we
always need a catch-all, so I feel we should discuss changing the default
separately once we have decided what the catch-all should be.

Apologies for the rather convoluted email, but their are plenty of intricacies
that most may not be aware of.

Thanks,

James