[Sugar-devel] Patch review (was: Re: Community)

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 18:28, Sascha Silbe
<sascha-ml-reply-to-2010-2 at silbe.org> wrote:
> Excerpts from Tomeu Vizoso's message of Tue Aug 31 13:20:31 +0200 2010:
>
>> > What do you think about a model where we have some git repo that
>> > everyone can commit to after they got, say, at least two Reviewed-By
>> > (including one from a core / "long"-term developer)? The contributors
>> > would get more testing of their work (=> less bugs in the release) and
>> > the module maintainers would be able to pick resp. skip the patches they
>> > feel (un)comfortable with.
>>
>> But then we would need to resync at some point or merging would get
>> worst with time?
>
> We could rebase after each release, like (at least some of) the Linux
> folks are doing. Either on the master branch, or by creating a new
> branch for each release (like the OLPC kernel repo).

Sounds good.

>> > Another idea would be a mailing list where early versions of patches are
>> > posted and can get some (incomplete) review. This would allow
>> > contributors to get fast & easy feedback with a limited amount of time
>> > spent for the reviewers. Reviews could just point out a subset of issues;
>> > a thorough review and deciding whether it's good enough to be merged
>> > would happen like above.
>>
>> I liked how it worked in sugar-devel for a while, a separate mailing
>> list would be also ok if the reviews do disturb people or whatever is
>> the reason for having stopped doing that.
>
> To make it clear: Both the new mailing list and sugar-devel would carry
> reviews. The difference is that RFC / PoC style patches would land on
> the new mailing list, whereas those intended to get into mainline as-is
> would be on sugar-devel.
>
> This would give a clear indication about whether a patch is intended
> for mainline and also keep the "newbie" traffic off sugar-devel (IIRC
> some people have complained about the high traffic on sugar-devel).
>
> The drawback is that we might miss some feedback from people who only
> subscribe to sugar-devel but not to the new list. But then those are
> probably the same people that would have complained about the increased
> traffic. ;)
>
> An alternative would be to clearly mark patches with e.g. "RFC" in the
> subject and create mailing list topics to allow filtering out review
> related traffic. We already have "[ANNOUNCE]" and "[RELEASE]" topics
> to allow anyone to receive only important announcements. The drawback
> of this alternative is that few users notice this option and might
> unsubscribe instead of activating the topic filter.

I for one liked having patch submission and reviews in the same
channel as we discuss other development stuff. But will subscribe to
another mailing list if needed.

Regards,

Tomeu

> Sascha
>
> --
> http://sascha.silbe.org/
> http://www.infra-silbe.de/
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