Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Recruitment (Reviewers, Testers, Maintainers, Hobbyists)

[josh@joshtriplett.org]

On Thu, Jul 09, 2015 at 05:47:18PM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 09, 2015 at 01:50:49PM -0700, Guenter Roeck wrote:
> > 
> > Earlier it was discussed how to improve the recognition of reviewers.
> > Your comments seems to suggest the opposite, and may actually discourage
> > reviewers. Why should I review Linux kernel code if that is seen
> > by some as me trying to "game" the system ?
> 
> So I were designing an initial system that automatically scored
> reviewers, I'd be looking to see, from a holistic point of view, how
> many reviews were zero-length:
> 
> Reviewed-by: John Q. Random <seventeen@random.org>
> 
> ... and nothing else,
> 
> .... versus how many reviews had specific comments on various
> different portions of the patch.  If possible, the automated system
> would try to distinguish between comments that were just pointing out
> whitespace issues (which would be a slight positive) with comments
> that point out genuine design issues (this will be really hard to do
> in an automated fashion, but a very sophisticated nueral network[1]
> mgiht be able to hack it).

That assumes the patch actually has issues.  To use the reviews I do on
RCU patches as an example, in a patch series, I might reply to a few
patches with "here are some issues; with those fixed, Reviewed-by...",
and then reply to the remaining unproblematic patches (individually or
in aggregate) with just the Reviewed-by.

- Josh Triplett