[Ksummit-discuss] [TOPIC] Encouraging more reviewers

Jonathan Cameron jic23 at jic23.retrosnub.co.uk
Thu May 29 08:39:15 UTC 2014


On 29/05/14 03:15, Rob Herring wrote:
> On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 1:47 PM, Paul Walmsley <paul at pwsan.com> 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.
>
> What really needs to change here as we already essentially have this
> today. Getting more reviewer bandwidth is why we have 5 DT binding
> maintainers. DT bindings are a bit unique in that almost everything
> goes in thru other maintainers trees, so the role is almost entirely
> reviews. But what's to say a co-maintainers role is not solely
> reviews. How co-maintainers split up the load is really an internal
> decision among them.
>
> Do we really have people we trust to review that we wouldn't trust to
> be a co-maintainer?
There are people who effectively fulfil this role already but for
are perhaps under pressure from their employer not to formally take
on a co-maintainer role? (this happened to me a while back - I
think it might have been something that had to go a few too many steps
up into management...)  Note that the person in question took on most
of the role in reality anyway but isn't formally acknowledged for it.
   
>
> Rob
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