Open Stack

I don't meant to pick on you personally Jiří, but I have singled this
message out because I feel you have captured the objections to Robert's
initial email well.

Excerpts from Jiří Stránský's message of 2013-10-08 04:30:29 -0700:
> On 8.10.2013 11:44, Martyn Taylor wrote:
> > Whilst I can see that deciding on who is Core is a difficult task, I do
> > feel that creating a competitive environment based on no. reviews will
> > be detrimental to the project.
> >
> > I do feel this is going to result in quantity over quality. Personally,
> > I'd like to see every commit properly reviewed and tested before getting
> > a vote and I don't think these stats are promoting that.
> 
> +1. I feel that such metric favors shallow "i like this code"-reviews as 
> opposed to deep "i verified that it actually does what it 
> should"-reviews. E.g. i hit one such example just today morning on 
> tuskarclient. If i just looked at the code as the other reviewer did, 
> we'd let in code that doesn't do what it should. There's nothing bad on 
> making a mistake, but I wouldn't like to foster environment of quick 
> shallow reviews by having such metrics for core team.
> 


I think you may not have worked long enough with Robert Collins to
understand what Robert is doing with the stats. While it may seem that
Robert has simply drawn a line in the sand and is going to sit back and
wait for everyone to cross it before nominating them, nothing could be
further from the truth.

As one gets involved and start -1'ing and +1'ing, one can expect feedback
from all of us as core reviewers. It is part of the responsibility of
being a core reviewer to communicate not just with the submitter of
patches, but also with the other reviewers. If I see shallow +1's from
people consistently, I'm going to reach out to those people and ask them
to elaborate on their reviews, and I'm going to be especially critical
of their -1's.

> I think it's also important who actually *writes* the code, not just who 
> does reviews. I find it odd that none of the people who most contributed 
> to any of the Tuskar projects in the last 3 months would make it onto 
> the core list [1], [2], [3].
> 

I think having written a lot of code in a project is indeed a good way
to get familiar with the code. However, it is actually quite valuable
to have reviewers on a project who did not write _any_ of the code,
as their investment in the code itself is not as deep. They will look
at each change with fresh eyes and bring fewer assumptions.

Reviewing is a different skill than coding, and thus I think it is o-k
to measure it differently than coding.

> This might also suggest that we should be looking at contributions to 
> the particular projects, not just the whole program in general. We're 
> such a big program that one's staleness towards some of the components 
> (or being short on global review count) doesn't necessarily mean the 
> person is not important contributor/reviewer on some of the other 
> projects, and i'd also argue this doesn't affect the quality of his work 
> (e.g. there's no relationship between tuskarclient and say, t-i-e, 
> whatsoever).
> 

Indeed, I don't think we would nominate or approve a reviewer if they
just did reviews, and never came in the IRC channel, participated in
mailing list discussions, or tried to write patches. It would be pretty
difficult to hold a dialog in reviews with somebody who is not involved
with the program as a whole.

> So i'd say we should get on with having a greater base of core folks and 
> count on people using their own good judgement on where will they 
> exercise their +/-2 powers (i think it's been working very well so far), 
> or alternatively split tripleo-core into some subteams.
> 

If we see the review queue get backed up and response times rising, I
could see a push to grow the core review team early. But we're talking
about a 30 day sustained review contribution. That means for 30 days
you're +1'ing instead of +2'ing, and then maybe another 30 days while we
figure out who wants core powers and hold a vote.

If this is causing anyone stress, we should definitely address that and
make a change. However, I feel the opposite. Knowing what is expected
and being able to track where I sit on some of those expectations is
extremely comforting. Of course, easy to say up here with my +2/-2. ;)