The thing is that we need committers to be allowed to ignore those messages and merge anyway. Some fixes may be necessary during the freeze period; and we cannot know in advance who's going to submit this fix to tweak the access rules in advance accordingly. This has to be a hint, not a blocker IMO.
Moreover, from this doc, I don't see how this is something that the Platform committers can easily play with. It seems deep inside Gerrit configuration. Also I don't see how we could have a rule to dynamically changing permissions.
I see no reason to annoy a user with warnings when he does not plan to merge anyway.
If a user doesn't plan to merge, they should probably use Gerrit Drafts or WIP changes, which are excluded from such checks.
At the freeze time window only some special users should have the right to merge that know about the freeze anyway.
That's not the reality of the project; we basically trust committers to do the right thing, and they agree with it when becoming committers. Here it's more about giving a hint to those committers, nothing about restraining who can do what.
However when it is just a info like what is possible implementing a gerrit plugin without putting a -1 on a gerrit it might be a nice feature.
So if this job were not voting but just printing a comment, it would be good enough in your opinion? That's totally doable in the job configuration...
