Dup of T38269 ?

Not a dupe; that task is about requesting new Gerrit repositories; this one is about +2 rights. But the two tasks are similar in scope. T38269 is also asking for a wiki-page based process to be moved to somewhere more suitable.

Can we just reuse #Wikimedia-Git-or-Gerrit for this process, asking people to file the same information that is now requested in the wiki page?

In T86639#973256, @Qgil wrote:

Can we just reuse #Wikimedia-Git-or-Gerrit for this process, asking people to file the same information that i now requested in the wiki page?

Then the project would need an exception for people to know that !vote is not disallowed as it usually is on the issue tracker.

Yes, in the new instructions we can encourage people to use thumbs up/down tokens in addition to whatever comments they want to leave.

Something unclear to me is who can process requests. Is there a list somewhere?

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Gerrit/Project_ownership says

Anyone in that group can now add more owners via https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/admin/projects/

but apparently this is not true, and the owners of a repo don't have permissions to add new owners on that repo. In practice I ping to @chad and @QChris whenever someone asks me, but this is clearly not scalable.

Anyone in Projects and group creators (which includes all admins and ops) has the ability to do this.

This power was devolved some time ago, but people don't make use of it.

Thanks @Chad. Next step: T88443: Create #Repo-Ownership-Approvers

In T88443#1027356, @hashar wrote:

Note Gerrit Administrators are allowed to create repositories as well https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/admin/groups/1,members

I never ever honored any request on the wiki page https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Gerrit/Project_ownership#Requests , merely because I hate wikitext based workflow. I have created a few that were requested either personally over IRC or via Bugzilla.

A mistake we did when creating Gerrit was lack of peer reviewed process to create repositories and changes user rights. We end up with a few people having the responsibility and no real way of track what is being changed nor wether the resulting configuration is consistent.

I would love to see repo creations and rights to be tracked via peer review / git as configuration changes. Then you only need a couple of folks with the actual rights to +2 (and thus merge).

Interesting. Do you prefer to implement this peer review / git process right away, should we use the Phabricator based process proposed here as an interim solution, or should we keep the current process at mediawiki.org until, say, we have #Code-Review in Phabricator?

I would dish out the mediawiki.org page and move to Phabricator. Much like ops have an ops access request queue. Then have a community of people having appropriate Gerrit user rights made watchers of the projects and handle the queue.

Ideally, we would get the project creation and user rights config managed via a git repo, this way we could leverage the Gerrit code review system to have a peer review / workflow to approve creation of repositories. That needs a lot of integration works though we can steal part from OpenStack which using a git repo to configure Gerrit projects. I don't think it is worth it.

TL;DR: migrate to a Phabricator project with assigned people.

Sumana used to check the wiki page regularly, so requests would be processed on a timely basis. Whenever I've asked Chad on IRC to take a look at the page, he'd usually resolve them pretty quickly.

I typically prefer on-wiki workflows, but if moving to Phabricator gets it more visibility, I'm all for it.

If someone is watching regularly, then probably on-wiki and on-task are probably very similar. However, if this is not the case, then Phabricator offers better tools to CC, prioritize and, basically, annoy the people that can solve your problem. :)

So if I interpret comments on T88443 correctly, it is wanted to move this to a Phabricator project that people would join the project. Then folks (who?) would join by becoming project members and subscribe to the project in order to receive updates?

In T86639#1059597, @Aklapper wrote:

So if I interpret comments on T88443 correctly, it is wanted to move this to a Phabricator project that people would join the project. Then folks (who?) would join by becoming project members and subscribe to the project in order to receive updates?

Oh no! The aim of this task is to phase out the wiki page https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Gerrit/Project_ownership and have requesters fill tasks in Phabricator. T88443 is about creating a group of people that will receive notifications / act on those requests.

@hashar: Yeah that's also how I understood. I just expressed it badly, sorry for that!

I missed the implementation part...I can't join the approvers group, so how do I watch all requests like I was able to do on a wiki page?

@Legoktm: Any member of the group can add you to the group: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/members/1076/

In T86639#1062874, @Aklapper wrote:

@Legoktm: Any member of the group can add you to the group: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/members/1076/

That doesn't make sense, because I can't actually give people ownership permissions. I just want to be able to watch all ownership requests.

Maybe in this case we can just loosen the policy to join the Phabricator project, since the actual permissions are given in Gerrit.

@Legoktm, @Jdforrester-WMF, now the projects is joinable by all users.

In T86639#1063884, @Qgil wrote:

@Legoktm, @Jdforrester-WMF, now the projects is joinable by all users.

Thanks!