Re: Need more reviewers!

On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 6:54 AM, Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-09-04 at 10:45 -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
>
>> Please volunteer now!
>
> Everybody is stuck in "I'm not good enough to do a full review". They're
> right (myself included), so that just means we're organising it wrongly.
> We can't expect to grow more supermen, but we probably can do more
> teamwork and delegation.
>

As a first-time reviewer, I agree with Simon's comments, and I'd like
to make the point that there's currently no written policy for how to
review a patch.

I let Josh know that I was interesting in joining this commitfest as a
"round robin" reviewer, and he's assigned me a patch. Okay. What am
I supposed to do now?

I can certainly download the patch, test it, review the code, and
write my thoughts to the list. I can then add a "review" link to the
wiki page. Assuming I think the patch is acceptable, what then? Do I
hand it off to somebody else for a full review/commit? How do I do
that? etc.

At the moment, for the review virgin, "please volunteer now"
translates roughly as "please elect to join an opaque and undocumented
process which has until now been handled entirely by committers".
That might have something to do with the low turnout.

We have a (really useful) wiki page called "Submitting a Patch". I
think we need one called "Reviewing a Patch".

That way, instead of just an appeal to the masses to volunteer for
$NEBULOUS_TASK, we can say something like "Please volunteer to review
patches. Doing an initial patch review is easy, please see our guide
<link> to learn more."

Cheers,
BJ