[Dev] Rotating build sheriff duties?

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 06:29 PM 12/7/2005 -0800, Heikki Toivonen wrote:
>pje said that if we had better tools and possibly
>organizational changes, sheriff wouldn't be needed, but he did not seem
>to deny the need currently.

That's because I'm not in a position to reasonably argue that you and Bear 
don't need or want something you've said you need or want.  :)  I'm more 
than willing to do my time as sheriff, but that's not quite the same thing 
as saying we *need* one.

To be honest, I think we'd achieve more progress if, when somebody 
complains about the build being broken, you or Bear simply pointed them to 
whoever caused the problem.  From there, we could simply let the forces of 
natural selection and social pressure take over.  :)

Putting a sheriff between the offenders and the offendees just enables the 
offenders' dysfunctional behavior - it allows people in the current case to 
blame the sheriff instead of themselves, and to perhaps ignore the impact 
on other people.  If they are directly subjected to the complaints, 
however, then they can't hide behind the idea that it's just you and Bear 
being picky or something.

The rotation seems like a nice theory to solve the same issue, but in 
practice it seems unlikely that any given sheriff-of-the-day is going to be 
particularly enthusiastic about confronting such issues.  After all, why 
argue today when you can let it slide till tomorrow?  This will just 
further exacerbate the problem of a lack of social pressure and continue to 
enable the idea that this is just bureaucracy or whatever excuses are being 
used.

My take, then, is that we need not a rotating "build sheriff" but a 
rotating "tinderbox wrangler".  The difference being that the former is 
expected to enforce rules, and the latter is a co-ordinator for various 
technical issues and a temporary replacement for better monitoring tools in 
certain areas.  I don't mind being a tinderbox wrangler, but I really don't 
want to be a sheriff.