[Ksummit-discuss] [TOPIC] Encouraging more reviewers

josh at joshtriplett.org josh at joshtriplett.org
Wed May 28 20:15:46 UTC 2014


On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 06:47:43PM +0000, Paul Walmsley wrote:
> On Sat, 24 May 2014, James Bottomley wrote:
> 
> > I'm sure there are many other things people could suggest.
> 
> What's needed is to bring quality reviewers up to the same level of 
> recognition and control as maintainers.
> 
> Ideally, maintainers would recognize quality reviewers, and list them in 
> the MAINTAINERS file - perhaps with an "R:" tag?  Maintainers would be 
> expected to designate at least one quality reviewer, but ideally more, for 
> a given subsystem.  
> 
> Then we should require every patch to have at least one "Reviewed-by:", 
> aside from the maintainer's "Signed-off-by:" before being merged.  This 
> "Reviewed-by:" could come from the maintainer, but ideally would come from 
> a quality reviewer.
> 
> Patch submitters would need to get their patches reviewed by at least one 
> of the recognized reviewers before expecting it to be merged.
> 
> Part of the goal here would also be to convert quality reviewers into 
> co-maintainers over time, so maintainership duties can be spread among a 
> larger group of people.

I would love to see this changed.  Right now, only people considered
co-maintainers get listed in MAINTAINERS.  With how get_maintainer.pl
works, it would make sense to use it as a more general list of "CC these
people on patches to this subsystem".

Many subsystems use mailing lists for this, but mailing lists suffer
from diffusion of responsibility: "someone else on the list can review
this patch".

- Josh Triplett


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