Bug 31046 – committers.py needs a concept of "expired" committers/reviewers

• Status: NEW
• Component: Tools / Tests

[Eric Seidel (no email)]

committers.py needs a concept of "expired" committers/reviewers

We have historical commits from folks in svn who are no longer part of the webkit project (mostly former Apple employees).  Committers.py should know about them as a central place to keep their real names, etc., but we don't currently have a way to store non-active committers in committers.py.  This bug is about adding such an ability.

[Mark Rowe (bdash)]

Given that we as the WebKit project don’t have a concept of “expired” committers or reviewers I think it would be premature to add one to this script without first discussing with the webkit-reviewers list exactly what this would entail.

[Eric Seidel (no email)]

Happy to discuss this further on any list.  This came out of research done as a part of bug 30970, where I discovered there are several folks who used to commit to webkit but no longer do. I assume (perhaps wrongly) that their commit bit might not even work anymore (since I know that some of those folks don't even work at Apple anymore).  It makes sense to me to document the existence of historical committers.  But I agree expired committers is a topic needing more public discussion.

See:
https://bug-30970-attachments.webkit.org/attachment.cgi?id=42352

Examples:
last commit     email                                   committers.py record
2005-03-09   [e-mail]       None
2005-03-07   [e-mail]           None
2004-05-28   [e-mail]           None
2003-08-22   [e-mail]       None
2003-08-12   [e-mail]           None
2003-03-12   [e-mail]           None

[Mark Rowe (bdash)]

I don’t think that any of the people that you’ve listed even have commit access any more.

[Eric Seidel (no email)]

Yeah, I guess that's what I mean by "expired" committers.  Not a penalty box or anything.  Just record keeping of people who once committed to WebKit but no longer do.  That allows our scripts to deal with them as objects instead of just "goldsmit" (Which most people wouldn't know is actually [e-mail] or "Debbie Goldsmith".) :)

[Eric Seidel (no email)]

Created attachment 42609 [details]
Patch

[Eric Seidel (no email)]

Comment on attachment 42609 [details]
Patch

I think I've decided it's better to just add all committers who have ever committed to committers.py.  If we chose to "expire" some of them later, we can revisit this patch.