[libreoffice-projects] [ANN] Please use Gerrit from now on for Patch Review

[Bjoern Michaelsen]

Hi,

On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 07:24:30PM +0200, Petr Mladek wrote:
> Sure but who will be the reviewer? The mailing list has the advantage
> that people step in when they are interested. It helps to balance the
> workload. Also it is very open for new reviewers. I am afraid that
> gerrit could make some people fell like reviewing robots.

There is no "default reviewer", so patches would just wait for somebody to pick
them up, just like on the list. Add just like you can CC someone on the list,
you can set a reviewer when submitting the patch. But in addition someone
looking into the submitted change can say "I have no idea about this area of
code, but foo might", just like on the list, but with less noise. If some devs
get to be reviewing robots that is unfortunate and we would need to find a
solution, but I doubt that to be related to gerrit, it would be the same on the
list -- just with more noise.

Note that you can watch for changes matching some criteria:

 http://gerrit.googlecode.com/svn/documentation/2.1.6/user-search.html

and get an email, when one of those arrives. So you can get an email for
patches that touch "^sw/" or "^sc/" without having to wade through the rest. I
know it takes courage to self-inflict yourself to be spammed for incoming
patches, but if we core devs do that with changes we feel confortable about, we
can make life easier for everyone, as there hopefully will be only few patches
to review left after everyone takes care about the ones he feels comfortable
about (and we shorten a lot of the "I dont know about that one, foo care to
take a look?" noise). It makes you make your quota of reviews with patches you
actually care about, which is kinda nice, I guess.

> Let's discuss this on the ESC meeting. I am afraid that people will not
> look into gerrit regularly. For example, I open bugzilla only when I get
> a mail about a change or when I see an interesting bug number in mail
> conference or irc.
> 
> People have only limited time to monitor mailing lists, irc, other
> tools. We need to be careful about adding too many channels to monitor.

see above, I guess a daily digest to the ml and a watch on the modules you care
about will get better focused information for everyone. Also note that some
people might prefer to browse the patches on gerrit. I for one would prefer to
wade through some patches en bloc in the morning and then proceed to the
interesting discussions on the dev list rather than having both sprinkled into
each other.

Best,

Bjoern