[Telepathy] The telepathy-reviewers mailing list.

[Sjoerd Simons]

On Fri, 2011-03-25 at 12:52 -0400, Olivier Crête wrote:
> On Fri, 2011-03-25 at 16:34 +0000, Will Thompson wrote:
> > Hi folks,
> > 
> > I'd like to propose a few people for commit access as per the WIP
> > procedure at <http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/Committers> (which
> > is based on WebKit's). That page says that Telepathy reviewers are
> > defined to be the set of people on the telepathy-reviewers mailing list,
> > which is currently rather anaemic:
> > <http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/roster/telepathy-reviewers>.
> > 
> > Are we okay with having a Grand Unified List of Reviewers for all
> > Telepathy components hosted on freedesktop.org, just as commit access is
> > all-or-nothing? Obviously people on the list should exercise their own
> > judgement as to whether they're able to give patches in particular areas
> > of different projects the thumbs-up.
> >
> > Thoughts?
> 
> I don't think it's a good idea to have random people review stuff for
> random modules. Since our modules are relatively small, I think there
> should be a owner/maintainer for each module so we have a minimum of
> accountability. Also, the maintainer should always have an overview of
> the changes to his module, so that he can maintain a good level of
> consistency
> 
> Also, some modules (like tp-farsight/farstream) require specialized
> knowledge so in practice only one or two people could review them
> anyway.

I'm not sure how you get from Will saying that people should use their
own judgement to what patches they can review to ``have random people
review stuff for random modules''. Note that this is also encoded in the
criteria themselves.

The "Criteria for Reviewers" section has the following:
  They are also expected to show good judgement in whether or not they 
  review a patch at all, or defer to another reviewer.

Futhermore it has:
  They should also be in touch with other reviewers and aware of who are
  the experts in various areas.

The first bit is crucial for a reviewer imho, it basically says ``Know
your own limits''. 

Do note that using this procedure doesn't any way change how things are
currently done wrt. reviewing. It's just there to have a more clear
definition of when someone gets/can expect a certain status. 


To come back to the original question, I'm totally fine with having a
grand unified list of reviewers and comitters and would very much be
against anything else. At some point in time we had a wiki page with a
matrix of projects and reviewers, which is just a massive pain to
maintain and will never reflect reality.

The reality is always that some patches can be reviewed by essentially
any comitter and others can be best reviewed by one particular person.
That one person can be different for different areas of a project!

It would be nice to have some indication of core area on the reviewers
wiki page though, just to make it easier for people to find someone if
they need a review for or ask about a project :). 

-- 
Sjoerd Simons <sjoerd.simons at collabora.co.uk>
Collabora Ltd.