Re: [Ksummit-discuss] "Maintainer summit" invitation discussion

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>]

On Thu, 2017-04-27 at 13:02 +0200, Hannes Reinecke wrote:
> On 04/27/2017 12:41 PM, Lee Jones wrote:
> > On Thu, 27 Apr 2017, Jani Nikula wrote:
> > > On Wed, 26 Apr 2017, James Bottomley <
> > > James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com> wrote:
> > > > Agreed, but I think you'll find most maintainers have a "trust 
> > > > factor" for reviewers.  Perhaps we should discuss how we arrive 
> > > > at this and how we should make it more public.  The way I often 
> > > > deal with less trusted reviewers is to redo their review and 
> > > > point out all the things they missed and ask them not to come 
> > > > back until they can be more thorough.
> > > 
> > > I think that's also a bit harsh, because I think the only way to 
> > > become a better reviewer is to... review. I know it's hard to 
> > > balance being welcoming to new reviewers and ensuring the patches 
> > > do get proper review in the end.
> > 
> > I'm inclined to agree, this is a harsh approach.  My personal 
> > method is to allow anyone to review, regardless of their 
> > credibility/trust status.  I make a point not to hamper or 
> > criticise anyone that's genuinely tying to help, unless of f course 
> > they are dishing out bogus review comments, then those will need 
> > addressing, but only picking up even say 10% of the issues really 
> > isn't a problem.  It doesn't matter how many points are picked-up 
> > or missed, we as Maintainers can always conduct an additional
> > review or one in parallel.

OK, so I should clarify that where I'm coming from is that I want not
to have to review something if someone else has already done so.  I
suppose I should add that you mostly get these type of comments from me
if I expected I could rely on your review but a random inspection found
significant issues.

> > I find additional reviewers particularly helpful if I'm overloaded,
> > since I can then insist that the contributor fixes all outstanding
> > review comments before I conduct my, hopefully thorough, review. 
> > 
> Indeed. From my POV the biggest problem is a shortage of reviewers, 
> and we should be working on getting that resolved.

So wouldn't making review a precondition for patch acceptance be a
strategy for at least helping with this?

> In fact, most developers I'm working with simply are too scared to do
> any reviews, feeling as they do not being qualified enough.
> If we take the abovementioned route that's a sure way of putting them
> off reviewing for good.

I actually don't really believe people are afraid to review code.  I
think mostly (particularly in SCSI) they've got their hands full with
constructing submissions and don't want to expend the additional
bandwidth.

James