441271 - Please may I have a Despot account

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Infrastructure & Operations Graveyard :: Account Requests, task)

Description

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

I'm attempting to clean up the old review queue (see posts in .dev.planning). To do this, I want to allocate each Bugzilla component to a module, so that the component then has an owner who can be approached about doing reviews. 

It would be useful to have access to Despot to get non-preprocessed module owner data. Please may I have an account? My LDAP login doesn't work, so I presume I don't have one at the moment.

Gerv

Comment 1

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

Every user with CVS access for /cvsroot and/or /www has a Despot account, so you already have access to Despot. You're not a "despot" (Despot Admin), but you don't need to be that in order to do what you are wanting to do. You can just login to Despot, list all the partitions, and go from there.

If you need your Despot account password reset, we can do that for you.

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

OK, I didn't realise. I can log in.

It doesn't give me a list of modules with their owners and peers - I have to go into each individual page. If making me a despot would fix that, or give me access to more data, I'd like to request that. If the interface is the same for everyone, then I'll either have to get a database dump or scrape the current pages.

I note there's a field for associating newsgroups with a particular module. Would it be difficult to hack Despot to add another, similar field for Bugzilla Component? Who hacks on despot these days?

Gerv

Comment 3

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

(In reply to comment #2)
> It doesn't give me a list of modules with their owners and peers - I have to go
> into each individual page. If making me a despot would fix that, or give me
> access to more data, I'd like to request that. If the interface is the same for
> everyone, then I'll either have to get a database dump or scrape the current
> pages.

The interface is the same for everybody, so making you a despot wouldn't help. If you're going to scrape the pages, why not just scrape http://www.mozilla.org/owners.html ? It has all the information you need...

> I note there's a field for associating newsgroups with a particular module.
> Would it be difficult to hack Despot to add another, similar field for Bugzilla
> Component?

Probably not. Despot is in need of much renovation / rewriting, however.

> Who hacks on despot these days?

justdave, timeless, and me

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

justdave, timeless, reed: are you able to say how much effort it would be to add this additional field to despot? I think having a mapping of modules (and therefore module owners) to Bugzilla components would be useful for several things, not just review chasing. We already have one of modules to newsgroups.

Gerv

Comment 5

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

I think it's pretty useless, considering we're not using Despot anymore with Hg, and new people are coming in and getting access to Hg but not to CVS, so owners.html is going to get outdated pretty quickly. Plus, paths are changing with Hg due to stuff moving, but owners.html is going to have old CVS information.

Comment 6

[matthew zeier [:mrz]]

Reed commented, punting to justdave for his comments too.

Comment 7

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

... but it's really easy to add it.... just saying it might not be worth it with Hg.

Comment 8

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

If Despot is not being used with Hg, what's the plan for maintaining owners.html going forward?

Gerv

Comment 9

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

(In reply to comment #8)
> If Despot is not being used with Hg, what's the plan for maintaining
> owners.html going forward?

Punting to brendan / bsmedberg for an answer. I'd rather us just fix bug 353463. :)

Comment 10

[Benjamin Smedberg]

I really think despot is overkill in the new world. I think we ought to just maintain owners.html as a webpage in the future, with the members of the module-ownerhip-module managing it. We really don't need and can't have per-directory access control in mercurial repos.

Comment 11

[Brendan Eich [:brendan]]

Benjamin meant "maintain owners.html as a wiki page", I'm sure ;-).

/be

Comment 12

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Brendan: so can I create a "Module Owners" wiki page on wiki.mozilla.org, put a redirect on mozilla.org, and then add an extra field for "Bugzilla Components" to each entry and start filling it in?

Does anyone else need to sign off on this plan?

Gerv

Comment 13

[Brendan Eich [:brendan]]

Other despots such as dbaron and shaver (anyone else?) need to sign off too. I'm cc'ing myk as well, and mitchell. Given dbaron and shaver vacations, don't do anything for a week, but do let's talk.

/be

Comment 14

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Switching management of the list of owners to a wiki seems like the right move to me, as does maintaining a mapping from modules to Bugzilla components, and members of the module-ownership module (plus their delegates) being responsible for maintaining the list.

But ultimately the folks responsible for maintaining the list should get to decide what tool they use to maintain it.

Comment 15

[Mitchell Baker]

Gerv:  Bug 363542 is the one for the discussion of whether we want despot to maintain the owners list or not.

To answer your question, changing an ancient system like this that people have relied on for years without some discussion doesn't sound good to me.  The topic has come up in .governance as part of the Activities Modules discussion.  Probably best to reopen the bug and mention it there.  

If / when owners does move to the wiki, we'll need to (1) 

revise the Tracking Module Owner and Peer Data through Despot section of
http://www.mozilla.org/hacking/module-ownership.html to point to the wiki page for coding activities; and (2) integrate the list of coding modules with the non-coding modules (currently at http://wiki.mozilla.org/Module_Owners_Activities_Modules).  

Gerv, feel free to start the discussion.   It would be great to have someone who actually has a problem with despot to lead this discussion.

Comment 16

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Sounds like the original thing this bug was filed for (getting Gerv a despot account) is dealt with, and the rest of this discussion probably belongs on bug 363542 (possibly reopen that bug?).  It's certainly outside of IT's jurisdiction at the moment regardless.