On Thu, Jan 17, 2019 at 10:52 PM Greg Grossmeier greg@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?