Re: RFC: reviewer's statement of oversight

Rafael J. Wysocki
2007-10-08T22:03:40Z

On Monday, 8 October 2007 23:38, Theodore Tso wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 08, 2007 at 01:33:38PM -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> > Uhm, no. There is no reason an "unimportant" person couldn't review a
> > patch, and therefore perform a potentially highly valuable service to
> > the maintainer.
> >
> > None of these are indicative of the authority of the person acking,
> > reviewing, testing, or nacking. That's only as good as the trust in the
> > person signing.
>
> I would tend to agree. Right now I think the problem is that we are
> getting too little reviews, not enough. And someone who reviews
> patches, even if unknown, could be building up expertise that
> eventually would make them a valued developer, even while they are
> doing us a service.
>
> The concern that I suspect some people have is what if this gets
> abused by people who don't really bother to do a full review of a
> patch before they ack it. We could ask reviewers to include a URL to
> an LKML archive of their review, to make it easier to find a review of
> a patch so later on people can judge how effective they their review
> was. Unfortunately, this would be an added burden for the regular
> reviewers, so I doubt this would be well accepted as a practice. My
> suggestion is to not worry about this for now, and see how well it
> works out in practice. If we start getting half a dozen or more
> Reviewed-by: where the patch is pretty clearly not getting adequately
> reviewed, or where someone is obviously abusing the system, and social
> pressures aren't working, we can try to figure out then how we want to
> address that problem then. Let's not make the process too complicated
> unless we know it's necessary. Premature complexity is almost as bad
> as premature optimization....

I agree.

Greetings,
Rafael