Re: [RRR] [HACKERS] Commitfest: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

On 9/28/2010 8:33 PM, Itagaki Takahiro wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 10:18 AM, Robert Haas<robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> No, the column is very clearly labelled "Reviewers", not "Reviewer".
>> And we have certainly had patches with more than one person's name in
>> that field in the past. The issue is rather that we don't have enough
>> people reviewing. We haven't had enough people volunteer to do
>> reviews to even assign ONE person to each patch, let alone two. There
>> are, as of this writing, SEVEN patches that have no reviewer at all.
>
> Some of them might be too difficult to review. For example, replication
> or snapshot management requires special skills to review.
>
> I'm worrying about new reviewers hesitate to review a patch that has
> a previous reviewer, and then, if they think the remaining patches are
> too difficult for them, they would just leave the commitfest page.
>

If I might... I think it would be good to have new reviewers teamed
with experienced reviewer on a single patch. Let the newbie have a
crack at it while having a safety net too. Good for the newbie, good
for the project.

You just need a way to assign them. Message's are already sent out
saying "if you wanna help, email xyz to get started". A message like
that could be added to the web page. The commitfest overlord could
assign the newbie a patch and a sponsor, saying "dear newbie you'll be
working with bob on this patch, ask him any questions about the process,
you'll both do the review and you can compare your work to his, and
learn the process along the way".

The sponsor could answer any dumb questions off list, and every once and
a while say "Hey, that's a great thing to post to the mailing list for
everyone to review".

And/Or/Also, maybe a snippet on the page saying "dont feel like you have
to do a full review, if you can only do a part, do it, and someone else
can do the rest." And/Or: "feel free to review something someone else
is reviewing, more eyes = better prize".

-Andy