Have gerrit send additional information to first time committers

[Kyle Mestery]

Per an email discussion on openstack-dev, it was brought up to have gerrit send first-time committers some additional information to let them their know their patch is under review. A copy of the thread is below.

=======
On 10/31/2013 07:05 AM, Kyle Mestery (kmestery) wrote:
[...]
If we want to grow the committer base and help people to become
better reviewers, taking the time to show them the ropes is part of
the game.

hijacking the thread using Kyle's comment as an excuse.

It's not an 'if' but a 'since': since we are growing the committer base
at an incredible pace we should help them become also good reviewers as
rapidly possible.

One thing I already mentioned and I'll start doing this week in the
weekly Newsletter is to give a shoutout to those that do their first
review this week.

Another idea that Tom suggested is to use gerrit automation to send back
to first time committers something in addition to the normal 'your patch
is waiting for review' message. The message could be something like:

thank you for your first contribution to OpenStack. Your patch will
now be tested automatically by OpenStack testing frameworks and once
the automatic tests pass, it will be reviewed by other friendly
developers. They will give you comments and may require you to refine
it.

Nobody gets his patch approved at first try so don't be concerned
when someone will require you to do more iterations.

Patches usually take 3 to 7 days to be approved so be patient and be
available on IRC to ask and answer questions about your work. The
more you participate in the community the more rewarding it is for
you. You may also notice that the more you get to know people and get
to be known, the faster your patches will be reviewed and eventually
approved. Get to know others and be known by doing code reviews:
anybody can and should do it.

With links to the wiki for more details, of course. This sort of
messaging may help all the people that contribute tactically, those that
are asked by their manager to land a patch in here and are simply
lightly involved (not committed) in OpenStack. These are the ones that
may have an incorrect perception of how easy it is to have patches
landed in OpenStack as opposed to other large projects, like the kernel
or android and complain about our time to traverse the review system.

What do you think? How can we instruct gerrit to do this?

/stef

PS I put the text on
https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/welcome-new-committers for refinements.

[Anita Kuno (anteaya)]

If this blog post: http://anteaya.info/blog/2013/03/21/reviewing-an-openstack-patch/
or this one: http://anteaya.info/blog/2013/03/25/please-rebase-your-change-and-upload-a-new-patchset/
is/are helpful to supporting the education of new contributors please take whatever ideas/text you need that fits your goal.

I think this is a great idea.

[Julie Pichon (jpichon)]

I think this is great! Another interesting idea may be to put an indicator in Gerrit besides the name of first-time contributors if it is possible, kinda like Mozilla does (e.g. http://osswatch.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2012/12/11/creating-a-more-welcoming-place-for-new-contributors/ ). Ideally this would encourage reviewers to expand a little on their comments, for this particular patch.

[Jeremy Stanley (fungi)]

Integration into Gerrit's display as Julie suggests, while a neat idea, is probably not possible in our current deployment without patching Gerrit itself (something we're avoiding since we want to upgrade to latest upstream Gerrit and not maintain a fork any longer). I don't know whether latest Gerrit has a feature which could be leveraged to that end, but it's worth exploring once we're able to upgrade.

In the interim, having a hook which comments on the review (see code in the trivial rebase hook script for an example of that) with a distinct name like "Welcome New Contributor" would hopefully be sufficiently visible to the established reviewer community as a clear indicator of a first-time contributor.

[Tom Fifield (fifieldt)]

Indeed. I've had the idea for a while too Julie, but came to the same conclusion about needing to work upstream in Gerrit. It may well be possible, but the code there is ... interesting.

We could create another bug for that idea?

[OpenStack Infra (hudson-openstack)]

Fix proposed to branch: master
Review: https://review.openstack.org/58900

[Julie Pichon (jpichon)]

I should have known smart people would already have investigated this for OpenStack :) As suggested, I filed a Wishlist bug (bug 1256263) to track the idea.

[OpenStack Infra (hudson-openstack)]

Reviewed: https://review.openstack.org/58900
Committed: http://github.com/openstack-infra/jeepyb/commit/d3393475d1b240dffcbc32360b88f016f9ecc425
Submitter: Jenkins
Branch: master

commit d3393475d1b240dffcbc32360b88f016f9ecc425
Author: Tom Fifield <email address hidden>
Date: Thu Nov 28 12:27:56 2013 +1100

    Add script to post a gerrit welcome message

    This script, to be triggered by the patchset-created hook in gerrit,
    will post a welcoming message on new contributions from people who
    have never contributed to OpenStack before.

    The aim is to increase awareness of the place of code review in our
    community, and encourage users to participate, while managing
    expectations.

    The plan is to merge this, then test thoroughly on review-dev with
    a range of cases, including:
    * First time patch (post message)
    * Patch after change of email (no message)
    * Patch after existing patch (no message)

    Change-Id: I7bb2baeb37d3700ff07f39a8a29b4eaf41f5cd40
    Partial-Bug: 1246879