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The same arguments for merging could be brought up for other Platform sub-projects. Maybe in the end merging everything will be the final answer.
To be honest, I'd be in favor of that, too... but I think the problems are particularly acute for platform text due to the lack of committers.
> However, the drawback is that we loose the publicly declared leadership for those sub-projects and persons being accountable for that code when we merge everything into one pot.
There's a number of ways to address that.
Option 1: If the number of active committers in a project has dropped below a certain threshold, there's no need for leadership since there's nobody left to lead. So one option would be that small enough projects should just automatically move under the umbrella of another project and the existing leadership of the larger project can take ownership and responsibility for the smaller project. For example, having a management structure to manage the work of 1-2 developers may be needless overhead. With this option, we just disband platform text as a separate entity and add those responsibilities to platform UI.
Option 2: We loosten the coupling between teams and code. We could still have teams responsible for achieving certain deliverables, but they wouldn't need to be tied so tightly to a set of git repositories.
Option 3: Keep the current project structure, but broaden the permissions in gerrit. Allow commiters from one platform team to review and submit code in other repositories, but the "owners" of each platform project still get the final say on what goes in, involvement in all design changes, and the freedom to revert anything from their repository. This would make it easier to do the sort of large-scale-but-trivial changes and obvious bugfixes that make up most cross-team submissions, but would allow us to retain the current leadership structure and team autonomy. Gerrit permissions could still be removed in the unlikely event someone abuses this (most likely, the threat of removal would be sufficient if this ever becomes a problem).
Option 4: Change the leadership. Merge all of platform into a single project with a new reporting structure.
Thoughts?
- Stefan