[openstack-dev] [nova] A modest proposal to reduce reviewer load

Matthew Booth mbooth at redhat.com
Tue Jun 17 10:04:17 UTC 2014


We all know that review can be a bottleneck for Nova patches.Not only
that, but a patch lingering in review, no matter how trivial, will
eventually accrue rebases which sap gate resources, developer time, and
will to live.

It occurs to me that there are a significant class of patches which
simply don't require the attention of a core reviewer. Some examples:

* Indentation cleanup/comment fixes
* Simple code motion
* File permission changes
* Trivial fixes which are obviously correct

The advantage of a core reviewer is that they have experience of the
whole code base, and have proven their ability to make and judge core
changes. However, some fixes don't require this level of attention, as
they are self-contained and obvious to any reasonable programmer.

Without knowing anything of the architecture of gerrit, I propose
something along the lines of a '+1 (trivial)' review flag. If a review
gained some small number of these, I suggest 2 would be reasonable, it
would be equivalent to a +2 from a core reviewer. The ability to set
this flag would be a privilege. However, the bar to gaining this
privilege would be low, and preferably automatically set, e.g. 5
accepted patches. It would be removed for abuse.

Is this practical? Would it help?

Matt
-- 
Matthew Booth
Red Hat Engineering, Virtualisation Team

Phone: +442070094448 (UK)
GPG ID:  D33C3490
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