[Gluster-Maintainers] Changing Submit Type on review.gluster.org

[Nigel Babu]

Hello folks,

A few times, we've merged dependent patches out of order because the Submit
type[1] did not block us from doing so. The last few times we've talked about
this, we didn't actually take a strong decision either way. In yesterday's
maintainers meeting, we agreed to change the Submit type to
Rebase-If-Necessary. This change will happen on 18th September 2017.

What this means:
* No more metadata flags added by Gerrit. There will only be a Change-Id,
  Signed-off-by, and BUG (if you've added it). Gerrit itself will not add any
  metadata.
* If you push a patch on top of another patch, the Submit button will either be
  grayed out because the dependent patches cannot be merged or they will be
  submited in the correct order in one go.

Some of the concerns that have been raised:
Q: With the Reviewed-on flag gone, how do we keep track of changesets
   (especially backports)?
A: The Change-Id will get you all the data directly on Gerrit. As long you
   retain the Change-Id, Gerrit will get you the matching changesets.

Q: Will who-wrote-what continue to work?
A: As far as I can see, it continues to work. I ran the script against
   build-jobs repo and it works correctly. Additionally, we'll be setting up an
   instance of Gerrit Stats[2] to provide more detailed stats.

Q: Can we have some of the metadata if not all?
Q: Why can't we have the metadata if we change the submit type?
A: There's no good answer to this other than, this is how Gerrit works and
   I can neither change it nor control it.

[1]: https://review.gluster.org/Documentation/intro-project-owner.html#submit-type
[2]: http://gerritstats-demo.firebaseapp.com/

--
nigelb