[Ksummit-discuss] [TOPIC] Encouraging more reviewers

[Josh Triplett]

On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 12:20:20PM -0400, Mimi Zohar wrote:
> On Wed, 2014-05-28 at 16:26 +0200, Daniel Vetter wrote: 
> > On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 12:57 AM, Rafael J. Wysocki <rjw at rjwysocki.net> wrote:
> > >> However encouraging reviewers by treating reviewed-by tag with equal
> > >> "respect" as signed-off-by seems like the better way.
> > >
> > > I would even argue that it should be treated more seriously than sign-offs.
> > > After all, there are more patches applied (and all of them are signed-off
> > > by at least one person) than there are commits with the Reviewed-by tag.
> > 
> > Fully agreed on given reviews more credit than sobs. Authors of
> > feature already get all the praise and publicity for doing something
> > visible, which means review is always a background chore. But if we
> > lack reviewers then the pipeline for merging patches gets seriously
> > clogged up. At least that's been my experience with drm/i915, and
> > pretty much all the people there work for my employer so I can _make_
> > them review code. Still not enough.
> > 
> > It's a fine line though since we absolutely don't want people to
> > rubber-stamp 20 patches in half an hour just because someone told them
> > they need to "review" them. Plain more visibility to reviewers (lwn
> > stats?) might help even with the risk that it will be gamed for sure.
> > -Daniel
> 
> Like the other tags, 'Reviewed-by' isn't automatically generated and
> requires agreement from the person.  Perhaps the tag name implies too
> much responsibility, perhaps a 'Commented-by' tag would be less daunting
> for people reviewing the code.  And if it was highlighted in the
> statistics at the conference talks, then maybe there would be more
> participation.

Or perhaps in LWN's statistics, which focus on Signed-off-by but don't
mention Reviewed-by at all.

- Josh Triplett