[pulseaudio-discuss] Rethinking how we do reviews

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Mon, 2016-03-28 at 12:43 +0530, Arun Raghavan wrote:
> Hello,
> I'm sure it's not shocking or surprising to state that our patch review
> bandwidth is significantly lower than the rate at which contributions
> are coming in.
> 
> It is also quite demotivating to send patches to the list and have to
> wait weeks to hear about them, and kudos to all our patient
> contributors and everyone who's been pitching in on the review process,
> especially Tanu who's taken up the bulk of the heavy-lifting on this
> front.
> 
> While having Patchwork in place helps keep track of patches so we don't
> lose some through the cracks, it does not help decrease our review
> turnaround time by a whole lot.
> 
> To this end, I propose that we ease our review policy a bit. My
> proposal is that:
> 
> * Committers should have the ability to go ahead and push out their own
> changes without review, except ...
> 
> * User-facing changes should have some announcement and/or discussion
> (changing dependencies, new modules, etc.)
> 
> * Changes to API or protocol should undergo review at least to the
> extent of the API/protocol change
> 
> * Large infrastructure changes should go through a full review
> (slightly subjective, but I think we can leave this to individual
> judgment)
> 
> Our current way of doing things is good for keeping up code quality,
> but I think over time, with such a large patch backlog, we end up
> spending more and more time performing reviews, and less and less time
> working on features. This becomes quite draining and drops our overall
> productivity in contributing to the project.
> 
> At this point, I guess this is mostly for Tanu to buy into, and maybe
> David if he'd like to continue contributing at least on the ALSA side.
> Thoughts and suggestions from others are still welcome, of course.

The point of reviewing is to save time: it's more efficient to catch
bugs in review than debug them in production, and making the code as
easy to understand as possible saves time later when reading the code.
If this assumption of saving time is correct, isn't it then misguided
to skip reviews so that you could spend more time on writing new
features? Either the uncatched bugs start to pile up, or you won't have
time for writing new features anyway, since you'll be fixing bugs.

Being less picky about patches, as David suggested, can help make the
review process more efficient, and I have already started to ignore
some small coding style issues. Also, if a patch contains only trivial
problems, I prefer to fix it up myself instead of requiring a new
submission. If you see me complaining about something that isn't worth
complaining about, I welcome feedback about that. That said, I'm a bit
sceptical about the trivial coding style stuff contributing a lot to
the review times.

The best solution would be to get more reviewers, but I don't really
have good proposals for achieveing that (I'd be ready to invite
Alexander to be a maintainer, though, but I'm not sure he has much time
anyway). Another question is that what is limiting the current
maintainers' capacity? Is it other commitments and the fixed number of
hours in a day, or is more about motivation? For myself, it's certainly
motivation. In theory I nowadays have all the time in the world to do
reviews, but in practice I have very limited energy for it. I've been
experimenting with different approaches, trying to optimize my output.
Planning to spend many hours at a time doesn't seem to work. Currently
my approach is to do one review each day, and I've been able to keep up
with that quite well; maybe I'll try two patches per day at some point.
This "slowly but surely" approach certainly makes big patch sets less
intimidating.

-- 
Tanu