Topic on Talk:Gerrit/New repositories

Right now we're using a horrible wikitext hack with Git/New repositories/Requests and Git/New repositories/Requests/Entries to try to make a workflow, but it doesn't work very well. People screw things up from time to time, it's not always clear if there's a response needed, and it's very hard to get notified of new repo requests, having to watchlist a page you can't read.

I propose that we replace this with a simple Flow board, where requests go in the top and are marked "resolved" by the Phadbricator/gerrit admin that does the change. What do you think? Pinging @QChrisNonWMF in particular as he does almost all the work on this, so to a large extent it's their call. :-)

See phab:T38269.

Yeah, longer-term we can have a proper system, but for at least the next few months we can trivially switch to a simpler way…

I am not sure. Switiching now to Flow and then to Phabricator, would mean switching twice.

Currently I do not see a value proposition that would warrant switching twice.

But let's dive into the three problems you brought up:

• "People screwing up". Sure, once in a while, people screw things up when editing the Wiki pages. I am guilty of that too. But once in a while someone will screw up things regardless of what system we use. And that's ok. Screwups currently are very rare. And typically, I am the one fixing them for the repo request page, and I do not see that as a burden right now.

• "It's not always clear if there's a response needed". When I consider something done, I mark it {{done}}. I consider that equivalent to Flow's "Mark as resolved". So if it's not clear if there's a response needed, it's not a marking problem, but a language problem. Flow will not help me with language problems.

• "it's very hard to get notified of new repo requests". I get notifications most of the time. If I don't, it's emails that do not get sent. Flow would not help me there either.

So I'd say let's either switch to Phabricator when people can create repos in self-service mode, or let's stick with the tried-and-truely-annoying wiki table (unless there is a clear value in switching to an intermediate system).

Can you show me how you get e-mail notifications for each repo request? I only get watchlist e-mails, which means I often don't see troublesome requests until too late.

I also "only" get watchlist e-mails. But the page is edited

infrequently, so it works out :)

But note that if you need to get notifications of each and every repo

that gets created, neither this Wikipage nor Flow would do the

trick for you. Many people with sufficient privileges just create their repos

without adding them to the list. So neither the Wikipage (nor Flow)

can capture them.

Also, from time to time people file a request and then immediately

ping me in IRC. You'd have to be quick to catch such requests /before/

the "troublesome" repo gets created.

No watchlist, and no Flow would help you in these two cases.

If you think some requests are troublesome ... what should we look out

for?