New subject: Add a Gerrit label "WIP" to mark changes as work in progress

10 Sep 2015

Hi,

currently change owners use various ways to mark changes
that are not yet ready for review.  Recurring patterns are
commit messages beginning with "[WIP]" or "DO NOT MERGE"
and/or -1 votes by the change owner.  A common problem with
these solutions is that they cannot be used in Gerrit
searches, for example if someone is looking for open changes
to review, they must filter the results manually.  This also
affects scripts & Co. like the Wikimedia Dashboard at
http://korma.wmflabs.org/browser/ that need to use
heuristics to determine if a change is a work in progress
and thus should be ignored for statistical purposes.

There was a bug (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T52842)
to implement a "Work in progress" button/status with the
underlying goal to prevent dashboards/queues from the added
noise of "draft changes"/"[WIP]" changes, but it was
declined because a button is not going to be added.

I want to suggest to add a new label "WIP", inspired by
OpenStack's "Workflow" label.  Its "neutral" value is 0
("Ready for reviews").  If it is "voted" to -1 ("Work in
progress"), the change cannot be submitted.  This vote will
stick with new uploads until it is changed back to 0.

For searches, this will allow Gerrit users to restrict
search results by adding "label:WIP+0" to their filters.

Untested, the change would be something like:

| diff --git a/project.config b/project.config
| index 151eebd..93291e1 100644
| --- a/project.config
| +++ b/project.config
| @@ -12,6 +12,7 @@
|         owner = group ldap/ops
|         label-Code-Review = -2..+2 group Project Owners
|         label-Code-Review = -1..+1 group Registered Users
| +       label-WIP = -1..+0 group Registered Users
|         create = group Project Owners
|         editTopicName = group Registered Users
|         viewDrafts = group JenkinsBot
| @@ -78,6 +79,11 @@
|         value = +2 Looks good to me, approved
|         copyAllScoresOnTrivialRebase = true
|         copyAllScoresIfNoCodeChange = true
| +[label "WIP"]
| +       function = AnyWithBlock
| +       value = -1 Work in progress
| +       value =  0 Ready for reviews
| +       copyMinScore = true
|  [access "refs/meta/dashboards/*"]
|         create = group Project Owners
|         create = group platform-engineering

Tim