Open Stack

On Tue, May 29, 2018 at 7:42 PM, Zane Bitter <zbitter at redhat.com> wrote:
[trim]
> Since I am replying to this thread, Julia also mentioned the situation where
> two core reviewers are asking for opposite changes to a patch. It is never
> ever ever the contributor's responsibility to resolve a dispute between two
> core reviewers! If you see a core reviewer's advice on a patch and you want
> to give the opposite advice, by all means take it up immediately - with *the
> other core reviewer*. NOT the submitter. Preferably on IRC and not in the
> review. You work together every day, you can figure it out! A random
> contributor has no chance of parachuting into the middle of that dynamic and
> walking out unscathed, and they should never be asked to.
>

Absolutely agree! In the case that was in mind where it has happened
to me personally, I think it was 10-15 revisions apart, so it becomes
a little hard to identify when your starting to play the game of "make
the cores happy to land it". It is not a fun game for the contributor.
Truthfully it caused me to add the behavior of intentionally waiting
longer between uploads of new revisions... which does not help at all.

The other conundrum is when you disagree and the person has left a -1
which blocks forward progress and any additional reviews since it gets
viewed as "not ready", which makes it even harder and slower to build
consensus. At some point you get into "Oh, what formatting can I
change to clear that -1 because the person is not responding" mode.

At least beginning to shift the review culture should help many of these issues.