Add ability to indicate "gradual rollout" for shipping milestones

[krgovind]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Many Chrome features tend to be rolled out in a gradual fashion (via Finch), with the intention of monitoring regressions or compatibility impact, before the feature is fully enabled. Chromestatus currently allows feature owners to indicate shipping milestones; but it might be helpful (for readers of the entry) to also indicate that the rollout is gradual. This is especially salient information during the feature rollout time period.

Describe the solution you'd like Perhaps add the ability for feature owners to indicate gradual rollouts, and present that in the form of a text label adjacent to the shipping milestone.

Additional context The difficulty of communicating gradual rollouts on the Chromestatus page became apparent to us during the rollout for CHIPS which is gradually rolling out in Chrome M110, as we indicated on the intent-to-ship thread.

[jyasskin]

I think this is supposed to go in the "Finch experiment" field, but as #2511 points out, the meaning of the URL in that field is unclear. The field is also never used in the rest of Chrome Status: it's not propagated to Intent emails, nor is it shown in the UI as you've suggested here.

[bramus]

Coincidentally we were discussing this within the Chrome DevRel team this week. Here’s the process I went through to collect all needed info about a feature that is being rolled out via Finch.

I was trying to find out which version of Chrome has experimental support for https://chromestatus.com/feature/5089552511533056

It shows shipping in 123 but nothing about experimental support. Surely that can’t ship without testing … hmm.

In the Intent to Prototype link I found out that it’s controlled a Finch experiment.

(Only later I found out that Finch is also mentioned on the CrStatus entry, but the section with that info is collapsed by default)

Knowing that it’s controlled via Finch, I was still lacking a version at that point though.

Made my way to the bug and scanned for the CL that adds the feature to runtime_enabled_features.json5.

Then looked up the commit hash on Chromium Dash via https://chromiumdash.appspot.com/commit/f6c287b2b0fdd8a5aa44a1200232c77699a2f633, to finally get some version numbers.

(This last step can be omitted if you run an extension like CrBug Release Indicator, which automates this for you).

Adding it all up, I had to go to 5 different websites to get the information I needed. Ugh.

That’s a lot of hoops I had to jump through. It would be so much more handy if CrStatus could surface that info clearly and upfront, and in a structured manner (so that it’s scrape-able for automated dashboard stuff).