Definitely a good idea.
I'd like to further suggest that reviewers for particular parts of the codebase ought to be listed somewhere publicly. Rightly or wrongly a lot of people want guidance before embarking on a project to fix something. So if somebody has an idea or a patch, they don't have to do the "anyone? anyone? Bueller?" thing in bugzilla or wikitech-l. These reviewers could evolve into mentors, if they are so inclined.
When we have git, maybe we can even automate this with pull requests...
Of course we should still allow it to be as flexible as possible. It should be easy to re-assign a change to someone else's queue. No one person should be able to block commits.
On 12/20/11 3:01 PM, Brion Vibber wrote:
We've sorta informally done things were revisions have gotten tagged for some particular person's review as an area of specialty, but we've never really had formal division of labor among separate parts -- nothing for instance that can be used to automatically queue things up for particular peoples' inboxes for timely review.
Often, little things are suitable for many people to look at, but major subsystem refactorings -- like the landing of Aaron's file backend changes -- really are specialized and need to be looked over by somebody who's a specialist, rather than just whoever gets around to looking it over.
I'd like us to seriously consider having primary reviewers for various code modules, so things like this get handled asap and don't end up falling through the cracks -- big changes, and small confusing changes ;) -- should get pretty consistently treated.
Projects like Firefox or the Linux kernel tend to have responsible parties for various modules, who either manage ingestion of patches through the source control or issue tracker and do testing, review, feedback, and eventual merging. I think we would do well to emulate this a little more explicitly than we do today, especially if we're trying to keep from having an ever-growing review backlog.
Thoughts? Volunteers?
-- brion _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l