disallowing intial high-priority PRs

disallowing intial high-priority PRs

[Phil Edwards]

I've been informally requested to look into disallowing random anonymous
submitters from sending in PRs with the priority set to 'high'.  There's a
local policy that only the project maintainers have authority to set 'high'
priority (and thus steering the actions of a lot of people), and an annoying
number of the PRs showing up are from well-meaning people who feel their
specific problem is really really important.  (It is to /them/ but...)

Anyhow, I spewed out this hack.  Am I headed in the right direction?
(The problem with testing it is that the only gnatsd server available to
me is the one I'd eventually be modifying, i.e., no spare servers.)

Diff'd against stock 3.113 sources.


--- pr.c.orig	Tue Mar  2 19:18:54 1999
+++ pr.c	Wed Feb 28 16:37:48 2001
@@ -747,6 +747,16 @@
 	  if (verify_enum (i, pr[i].value, token))
 	    found = TRUE;
 
+          /* This hack prohibits random net submitters from submitting
+             a high-priority PR; the idea is that maintainers should be
+             the only ones permitted to raise priority to high.
+             This should be more configurable. */
+          if (found == TRUE && (!strcmp(pr[i].name,PRIORITY_STRING))
+                            && (!strcmp(pr[i].value,"high"))
+                            && (!strcmp(field_value(SUBMITTER),
+                                        pr[SUBMITTER].default_value)))
+            found = FALSE;
+
 	  if (found == FALSE)
 	    {
 	      if (check)



Any comments, flames, and suggestions would be highly appreciated.
Thanks for your time,

Phil

-- 
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The gods do not protect fools.  Fools are protected by more capable fools.

Re: disallowing intial high-priority PRs

[Milan Zamazal]

>>>>> "PE" == Phil Edwards <pedwards@disaster.jaj.com> writes:

    PE> I've been informally requested to look into disallowing random
    PE> anonymous submitters from sending in PRs with the priority set
    PE> to 'high'.  There's a local policy that only the project
    PE> maintainers have authority to set 'high' priority (and thus
    PE> steering the actions of a lot of people), and an annoying number
    PE> of the PRs showing up are from well-meaning people who feel
    PE> their specific problem is really really important.  (It is to
    PE> /them/ but...)

    PE> Anyhow, I spewed out this hack.  Am I headed in the right
    PE> direction?  (The problem with testing it is that the only gnatsd
    PE> server available to me is the one I'd eventually be modifying,
    PE> i.e., no spare servers.)

Thanks, Phil, for your suggestion.  However so that the patch was really
useful, the following things must be ensured:

- It's not worth to bother with GNATS 3.113, it's not developed anymore.
  The current development tree is GNATS 4 in CVS.  It's a major rewrite
  so it's usually not possible to apply GNATS 3.113 patches into GNATS 4.
  See http://sources.redhat.com/gnats/ for information how to access
  GNATS' CVS.

- The feature mustn't be hard-wired.  Your improvement is useful to you
  and I'm sure it would be useful to other people as well, but not to
  everyone.  If you think about such an improvement, I'd start with
  thinking about an appropriate configuration option in `dbconfig'
  (present only in GNATS 4).

BTW, if you need to test your changes on a running server, you can
configure GNATS for installation in a totally different directory and
test it there.  You can also configure it to connect to a gnatsd on a
different port than the default one or you can run gnatsd manually from
a command line.

Regards,

Milan Zamazal

-- 
The world is not something you can wrap your head around without needing years
of experience.                              -- Kent M. Pitman in comp.lang.lisp

Re: disallowing intial high-priority PRs

[Phil Edwards]

On Sun, Jun 24, 2001 at 05:33:38PM +0200, Milan Zamazal wrote:
> - It's not worth to bother with GNATS 3.113, it's not developed anymore.
>   The current development tree is GNATS 4 in CVS.  It's a major rewrite
>   so it's usually not possible to apply GNATS 3.113 patches into GNATS 4.
>   See http://sources.redhat.com/gnats/ for information how to access
>   GNATS' CVS.
> 
> - The feature mustn't be hard-wired.  Your improvement is useful to you
>   and I'm sure it would be useful to other people as well, but not to
>   everyone.  If you think about such an improvement, I'd start with
>   thinking about an appropriate configuration option in `dbconfig'
>   (present only in GNATS 4).

Well, I hadn't really intended for this patch to go into the GNATS master
tree; really I just wanted opinions on whether the patch should do what I
want it to do.  My thought was just to apply it to our local gnatsd (thus,
the 3.113 source).  It would probably not be a useful feature for other
projects, so I can't suggest that it go into the development of GNATS 4.


> or you can run gnatsd manually from
> a command line.

Ah, I might try that instead.

Thanks for your note!
Phil

-- 
Would I had phrases that are not known, utterances that are strange, in
new language that has not been used, free from repetition, not an utterance
which has grown stale, which men of old have spoken.
                                     - anonymous Egyptian scribe, c.1700 BC

Re: disallowing intial high-priority PRs

[Milan Zamazal]

>>>>> "PE" == Phil Edwards <pedwards@disaster.jaj.com> writes:

    PE> It would probably not be a useful feature for other projects, so
    PE> I can't suggest that it go into the development of GNATS 4.

Referring to the recent discussion about access rights, one might want
to have a flag allowing to set the `high' priority too.  I can imagine
situations when this would be useful.  But it would require much more
work to implement it.

Regards,

Milan Zamazal

-- 
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