2011/3/2 Mark A. Hershberger <omhershberger(a)wikimedia.org>rg>:
To help with code review, Roan introduced “sign-offs”
for developers who
are not as familiar with the MediaWiki code base. I'm sure he'll
correct me if I'm wrong, but I would like to encourage any developer who
isn't ready to mark code “OK” to use the sign-off feature — to indicate
that they've tested or inspected the code.
That's exactly what I had in mind when writing it, yes. Regardless of
your level of experience, you can mark commits as 'tested' if you've
confirmed it does what it claims to do. If you have some MediaWiki
experience but don't quite consider yourself a code reviewer or an
expert in the specific area a commit touches, you can read the diff of
a commit and mark it as 'inspected' to signify you've read the diff
and it looks fine to you.
If you test something and it's broken, or you read something and see
something bad, add a comment to the revision and set its status to
fixme. Before you do this, though, check the list of follow-up
revisions to see if the issue you're about to report has been fixed
already.
The sign-off system is designed specifically so that you absolutely
don't have to worry about being wrong or not having enough experience.
All a sign-off will do is add an entry saying "user X says this looks
good", and multiple users can sign off on a commit as tested,
inspected, or both, independently of each other. Sign-offs don't
change the status (new/fixme/ok/...) of a revision in any way, but
they will help the reviewer who ends up doing the final review by
telling them how many eyes have looked at a particular piece of code.
You need to be in the coder group on
mediawiki.org to perform
(almost?) all of these actions. If you don't have coder rights, don't
worry: they're given out very liberally. Any coder can promote other
users to coders, and the bar is generally not much higher than showing
good faith. Having commit access usually helps, but I don't believe
it's required.
So the bottom line is, anyone can help, and everyone is encouraged to do so.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)
P.S.: For the old hats, this is probably mostly stuff they already
know, but I figured this post could serve well as a general
introduction about how to get involved in code review as a relatively
inexperienced developer or end user, so I decided to take it that way.