[Koha-devel] Signing-off a patch for a customer

[Chris Nighswonger]

Hi Paul,

On Mon, May 28, 2012 at 10:48 AM, Paul Poulain <paul.poulain at biblibre.com>wrote:

> Hello koha-devel,
>
> I just pushed a follow-up for bug 6858. If you look at the patch, you'll
> see that the author is from BibLibre, as well as the sign-offer. But if
> you look more carefully on the patch comments, you may understand that
> Stephane Delaye has signed-off "in the name of the library". We're
> facing here a case where the library don't want/can't sign-off their
> patch (they don't know how to do it and don't want to bother with doing
> it. They just said this patch worked for them)
>
> At BibLibre, we have 3 project managers: Stéphane Delaye / Gaetan
> Boisson / François Charbonnier. They are librarians and are doing the
> glue between the library our customer and our developers.
> they know how to sign-off a patch.
>
> I want, in this mail, request that those 3 ppl from BibLibre (and only
> them) can be sign-offers for patches written by another BibLibre
> developer, once the library has confirmed it works.
>
> I propose that we define a standard message, something like
> Signed-off-by: Delaye Stephane <stephane.delaye at biblibre.com>
>  patch validated by <LIBRARY NAME>, signed-off in their name
>
> Can I have your agreement with this idea ?
> (of course, in case another support provider has the same kind of
> situation, this would also be applicable. It's not something I want for
> BibLibre only)


A look over the history of that bug seems to indicate that Biblibre has
been responsible for:

1. Creation of the code
2. Sign-off of the code
3. QA of the code

I am not comfortable with this situation. It is not particularly a
"Biblibre" thing with me, but a matter of principle. And it is occurring
with greater frequency.

I believe we need to stick with the principles we agreed to. This patch
clearly missed the "approval" of a dis-interested party in its initial
commit to master. (Perhaps Katrin mentioned this at some point, but I'm not
sure.) We need to take up the slack here and get a disinterested QA on this
followup prior to pushing it to master.

I am of the strong opinion that going forward we need to maintain a more
strict compliance with this principle of dis-interested sign-off/QA.
Clearly at times one or the other may be impractical, however, one *or* the
other is always possible. Perhaps it may not fit the desired schedule of
the vendor, but violation of this principle is the first step down a
slippery slope.

Kind Regards,
Chris
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