Open Stack

On Oct 31, 2013, at 1:49 PM, Stefano Maffulli <stefano at openstack.org> wrote:
> On 10/31/2013 07:05 AM, Kyle Mestery (kmestery) wrote:
> [...]
>> If we want to grow the committer base and help people to become
>> better reviewers, taking the time to show them the ropes is part of
>> the game.
> 
> hijacking the thread using Kyle's comment as an excuse.
> 
Hey, glad to provide you an opening Stef!

> It's not an 'if' but a 'since': since we are growing the committer base
> at an incredible pace we should help them become also good reviewers as
> rapidly possible.
> 
> One thing I already mentioned and I'll start doing this week in the
> weekly Newsletter is to give a shoutout to those that do their first
> review this week.
> 
> Another idea that Tom suggested is to use gerrit automation to send back
> to first time committers something in addition to the normal 'your patch
> is waiting for review' message. The message could be something like:
> 
>> thank you for your first contribution to OpenStack. Your patch will
>> now be tested automatically by OpenStack testing frameworks and once
>> the automatic tests pass, it will be reviewed by other friendly
>> developers. They will give you comments and may require you to refine
>> it.
>> 
>> Nobody gets his patch approved at first try so don't be concerned
>> when someone will require you to do more iterations.
>> 
>> Patches usually take 3 to 7 days to be approved so be patient and be
>> available on IRC to ask and answer questions about your work. The
>> more you participate in the community the more rewarding it is for
>> you. You may also notice that the more you get to know people and get
>> to be known, the faster your patches will be reviewed and eventually
>> approved. Get to know others and be known by doing code reviews:
>> anybody can and should do it.
> 
> With links to the wiki for more details, of course. This sort of
> messaging may help all the people that contribute tactically, those that
> are asked by their manager to land a patch in here and are simply
> lightly involved (not committed) in OpenStack. These are the ones that
> may have an incorrect perception of how easy it is to have patches
> landed in OpenStack as opposed to other large projects, like the kernel
> or android and complain about our time to traverse the review system.
> 
> What do you think? How can we instruct gerrit to do this?
> 
I think this is a really good idea. I've seen occasions were new committers
get antsy after waiting a few days (some even a few hours) and wondering
why their patch isn't getting reviewed. Something like this would set the
expectation for them correctly, and help to guide them to IRC to engage.

Thanks,
Kyle

> /stef
> 
> PS I put the text on
> https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/welcome-new-committers for refinements.