Pushing other people's patches to gerrit

[Bjoern Michaelsen]

Hi,

On Tue, Jan 03, 2017 at 10:27:30AM +0100, Jan Holesovsky wrote:
> I wonder - what setting needs to be set for them so that they can push
> other people patches?  Or do they need to get the full push rights?

They need the right to "forge commits" as that is what that is.

> And in general - what's the reason for such a restriction? 

There are two kinds of roles with a patch: the author of the work and the
person applying it to an existing codebase (committer). To be involved with
development, one should aim to become one of the two -- there is no sensible
third role.

In the case of backporting, there even might have been good reasons the
original author did not do it. Backporting a patch without checking back with
the author is at least very, very impolite IMHO. _Iff_ that is done, its
essentially a promise to take over any follow-up business (possible regressions
etc.) from that backport. To keep that promise, one needs to be a committer.

If cherrypicking was a free lunch, we could release from master and spare us
the whole hassle with branches and tags. It isnt.

Best,

Bjoern