evening the entry bar: git account management

[Daniel Stone]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 12:24:50PM -0800, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> i'm starting a new thread for this because it really is a parallel issue and i 
> don't want to hijack Vincent's thread to discuss it
> 
> On February 16, 2010, Daniel Stone wrote:
> > On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 10:21:02AM -0800, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > > On February 16, 2010, Vincent Untz wrote:
> > > > I learnt a few days ago that we finally have a xdg-specs git repo. So
> > > > let's move forward :-)
> > > 
> > > great!
> > > 
> > > now, how do people get push access to it? trolling around on
> > > http://www.freedesktop.org i couldn't find instructions on how to apply
> > > for an account or who would qualify for it.
> > 
> > http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/AccountRequests -- incidentally, this is
> 
> it's not linked to from:
> 
> 	http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/GettingInvolved
> 
> but it is linked to from the next sentence in the paragraph on the main page. 
> the linked sentence itself is: "See AccountRequests for information on how to 
> obtain CVS access to a project." CVS?

At the risk of being overly blunt -- it's a fucking wiki.  There's an
edit button; I'm willing to bet that it's fixable in far, far less time
than it took to write this email.

> the text on AccountRequests is the opposite of friendly: "To obtain an account 
> for a project hosted by freedesktop.org, you must follow these rules. Failure 
> to do so will probably result in your request getting dropped on the floor. 
> Don't take it personally if it does, the rules are there to make sure it 
> doesn't happen, so if they aren't followed ..."
> 
> that doesn't particularly make me want to get involved.

Fair.  Do you have any particular suggestions?

> the page doesn't describe who would qualify for an account or who i should 
> consult to see i i might qualify (i've got to figure that part out for myself; 
> ime, contributors rarely manage that on their own)

Which project are you contributing to? Are you writing a 3D driver for
Mesa, are you submitting a patch for a spec, ... ?

> the instructions are poor:
> 
> "Create a bug asking for an account. Select the Product that corresponds to 
> the Project for which you are requesting access. If there's no product in 
> bugzilla for the project in question, file it against the freedesktop.org 
> product, in the New Accounts component."
> 
> there is no hint as to what to use as the title or the component; i assume 
> that noticing requests for accounts happens by diligent people reading through 
> all new bug reports? sounds like a system that lends itself to accidental 
> failure?

How do you suggest we do it, given that the projects themselves may have
wildly different methods for deciding who should and should not have
edit access to their project? What if the Mesa guys want something
different to the X.Org guys who provably want something different to you
who may or may not want something different to others on this list?

> i'd like to do more than observe/complain, but i can't edit any of these pages 
> because the wiki is locked down even when logged in. so, sorry about not doing 
> something about the above.
> 
> compare and contrast the AccountsRequest page with what we use in KDE:

This is irrelevant: KDE is a single monolithic project.  X.Org people
are not qualified to decide who should get a HAL account, or whatever.
So yes, it would be nice if policies were unified, but the reality is
that they're not because we are one host for myriad projects.

> > > how long does it take to get an account set up?
> > 
> > Not long.
> 
> how long is long?

97 minutes.

> what is the policy on what is too long?

Common sense.

> > > who is responsible for making this happen? (and hopefully it's more than
> > > one person)
> > 
> > A few people.  Not me.
> 
> where are these "few people" defined?

ssh annarchy.freedesktop.org 'getent passwd | cut -f1 -d: | egrep "R$"'

> what is the community accountability?

In what sense?

> how do they know if a request should get approved for a given product?

Well, as you can see from the AccountRequests page, people in a position
of authority for the particular project approve or deny the request, and
then forward it on to the admins who implement their wishes.

> in general, there is a lack of transparency that makes it more difficult than 
> necessary to get a grasp on how to get involved (or even if one would want 
> to).

What would you like to get involved with?

> i would like to help fd.o document the processes better, improve the clarity o 
> the website (starting with examining who can edit it) and re-assess how git 
> accounts are handed.
> 
> thoughts?

You can now edit the wiki to your heart's content, but please try to
restrict your edits to actual reflections on how things today work,
rather than your vision of how you believe fd.o should work.  I'm happy
to clear anything up should you have any questions.

Beyond that, what do you actually want to reassess? Bearing in mind that
we have a large number of disparate projects with wildly different
criteria for who should and should not have an account (not to mention
that those projects are the only ones qualified to work out whether
people should or shouldn't have accounts), what do you suggest for
creating new accounts?
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