Staging workflow plugin to provide insight and clarity to contributors

[jberry-suse]

It is fairly common to see contributors confused about the state of their submit request to Factory and it is understandable given the lack of communication about the process present through the interface (or elsewhere for that matter). As an attempt to address that shortcoming and potentially gain contributions to the release tooling I propose a staging workflow plugin to be displayed on requests. The plugin should react to the various states in the process to highlight what has been done and what remains to be done. Additionally, links should be provided to the tools responsible for each stage and any relevant documentation.

A very rough mock-up of what I am talking about is included below.

I would expect plenty of expandable sections with links and additional information gathered from the various relevant sources.

Without having looked at the relevant bits of the OBS code-base I am not sure how easy it is to hook into the request rendering to make this happen, but I would imagine it would not be that hard to add the ability if it does not already exist. As for the plugin itself most of the state information is contained in the reviews or lack of certain reviews with the rest already provided by the obs_factory API that could be summarized and linked to.

@adrianschroeter any input on how to achieve this and potential resources from OBS team?

[jberry-suse]

I would also expect this to provide a straightforward way for contributors to discover the staging dashboards which are rather hidden otherwise. From personal experience as a long-time contributor prior to joining SUSE and talking to other folks the dashboards tend to be mystical places that people get links to in IRC.

After explaining the state of someone's requests, just two days ago, to a contributor more than familiar with other distributions' workflows their reaction to this idea was "YES, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD." I've had similar encounters for quite some time.

Increasing visibility may also encourage more folks to take a look at the broader set of stagings since the dashboards make it easy to start looking for problems.

[coolo]

this should really not be handled in an engine not maintained by OBS team. Better track this as OBS feature - let OBS team figure out how to integrate this. Hacking this into the engine once might even work if you put a lot of work into it, but keeping this uptodate with OBS maintenance will be about impossible.

[jberry-suse]

Alternatively, I know @lnussel has been pushing to see OBS team maintain obs_factory given its importance. I'll take that under advisement, but I imagine if placed in mainline OBS is should be abstracted far more into something generalized for defining and displaying/tracking workflows that take place around OBS. That is a bit more than I was hoping to tackle and a straight dump of Factory process feels misplaced in mainline OBS.