lack of reviewers

[Michal Suchanek]

On 18 May 2012 12:40, Peter Hutterer <peter.hutterer at who-t.net> wrote:
> On 18/05/12 19:26 , Michal Suchanek wrote:
>>
>> On 18 May 2012 01:14, Peter Hutterer<peter.hutterer at who-t.net>  wrote:
>>>
>>> On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 10:39:55AM +0200, Ernst Sjöstrand wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> (sorry for jumping in from the outside and breaking the thread!)
>>>>
>>>> I read about this problem and wanted to offer a suggestion!
>>>>
>>>> What if you set up a Gerrit server for git.freedesktop.org? That's the
>>>> tool the Android OpenSource project uses among other things:
>>>> https://android-review.googlesource.com/
>>>> Perhaps if it was easier to contribute to reviewing code, more people
>>>> would do it more often?
>>>
>>>
>>>> It's also a very nice tool I have to say, I use it every day at work.
>>>> It's easy to integrate with automatic
>>>> testing of patchsets before they're submitted to the repository for
>>>> example.
>>>
>>>
>>> tbh I doubt what we have is a tool problem. Patches are sent to the list
>>> and
>>> can be reviewed quite easily there (for subscribers, anyway). The issue
>>> we
>>> have is manpower and, more importantly, manpower of people with enough
>>> knowledge to judge whether a patchset has side-effects beyond the
>>> obvious.
>>>
>>> in the end, such patches tend fall on the shoulders of a few and adding
>>> another tool that they have to check will increase, not decrease, the
>>> workload for those.
>>
>>
>> tbh using a mailing list for that looks very impractical.
>>
>> - patches get missed completely
>
>
> true. we do encourage people to re-submit. which, aside from the obvious
> disadvantage, has advantages too. I found the problem with any todo list is
> that sooner or later it becomes so long that you either have to wipe it (by
> switching to a different system sometimes) or you start ignoring stuff
> anyway.
>
> given that one of the problems is reviewer bandwidth, I expect this to
> happen with any new tool. patchwork was great in the first few weeks, now
> it's a kitchensink great for getting URLs and not much else.

Given that reviewer bandwidth is scarce it would be perhaps helpful to
spare it by having a tool that presents all the not-yet-reviewed
patches in one place rather than reviewers fishing for them in the
mailing list or in the patchwork.

>
> requiring people to ping when patches get missed at least notifies us which
> patches have people behind them that care. a feature that gets submitted
> once, forgotten and no-one pings for it may not have been that important to
> begin with.

When you get the 5th patch for the same regression submitted the third
time it starts to look like shouting your patches off a cliff in the
dead of the night.


>
>
>> - there is no track of what is related to what (as in the part of the
>> same patchset or new revision of the same patchset)
>
>
> patch are usually in numbered series, in threads, with new revisinos being
> prefixed with "v2", "v3", etc. requires submitter discipline but it works to
> some degree.

And as some of the patches get replies they get out of order and
completely out of context.

>
>
>> - you get a lots of list noise due to patches being sent one by one
>
>
> I'm not sure I follow this argument, can you expand?

Like a series of 10+ patches for some part of the X server I do not
understand landing on the list several times.

I guess some people are fond of replying to the patches and quoting
them in their email client and I can see that as nice feature but it's
paid for by tons of list traffic. Necessarily large part of that is
meaningless to most.

The alternative is, of course, a link to git branch or something like that.

Thanks

Michal