lack of reviewers

[Chase Douglas]

On 05/20/2012 08:42 AM, Simon Thum wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I would like to tell another story, perhaps you follow me.
> 
> I work on a project with a quite sharp gradient of competence in the 
> development team. We do use gerrit and a build server which verifies our 
> patches.
> 
> The effect of gerrit - in our case! - is to encourage the less 
> knowledgeable people to do more complicated changes because they can 
> rely on the infrastructure to catch most errors for them. Also, we all 
> sleep better knowing it's hard to break the thing.
> 
> Gerrit discerns "review" from humans from "validation" e.g. from 
> tinderbox. Every patch is validated independently, as far as is 
> possible. You know pretty fast when and where you made a mistake. Also 
> it will email you (configurable at the user level!) so you don't need to 
> check it actively if you don't like.
> 
> For us it pays. But it also costs:
> 
> The build process and unit testing has to be handled more rigid. We have 
> a lot of surrounding infrastructure just to nail the builds and tests. 
> It regularly needs attention to maintain.

Unfortunately, the X server really has near-zero test coverage. I would
not rely on compilation and existing test coverage as confirmation that
there will likely not be regressions in xserver. Not yet at least.

> All in all, I think this not really a social problem - it's a social 
> problem with technological roots, meaning it can be relieved 
> substantially. But it's not likely to be easy even if the tinderbox 
> already exists.

I think the larger issue to potentially resolving this issue is for
someone to do something about it. If someone who believes in gerrit sets
up an instance and goes through the trouble to make it work, then I and
hopefully others would be glad to try it out. X.org doesn't have funded
leadership that can tell people to do specific things, like create a
gerrit instance. It is up to individual developers to make the effort.

-- Chase