Re: RFC: reviewer's statement of oversight

Randy Dunlap
2007-10-08T18:09:17Z

On Mon, 08 Oct 2007 11:01:49 -0700 Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:

> Jan Engelhardt wrote:
> >> Acked-by:
> >> Tested-by:
> >>
> >
> > * Used by random people to express their (dis)like/experience with the
> > patch.
> >
>
> Tested-by is more valuable than acked-by, because its empirical.
> Acked-by generally means "I don't generally object to the idea of the
> patch, but may not have read beyond the changelog". Tested-by implies
> "I did something that exercised the patch, and it didn't explode" -
> that's on par with an actual review (ideally all patches would be both
> tested and reviewed).

but Tested-by: doesn't have to involve any "actually looking at/reading
the patch." Right?

IOW, the patch could be ugly as sin but it works...

> >> Reviewed-by:
> >>
> >
> > * I am maintaner or an 'important' person and have had a
> > look at it in depth
> >
>
> Hm. We have a tension here:
>
> * there aren't enough reviewers
> * some reviews are more useful than others
>
> While a review by a trustworthy person is invaluable, we don't want to
> discourage people from reviewing. A new reviewer's review may not be
> terribly useful, but a meta-review may help improve it. Or it could be
> a great review.
>
> I guess I'm proposing that we also need to expand the reviewer base, and
> to do so we need some kind of reviewer-mentoring or metareview process.
> Of course that could just be an extra burden on the existing (small)
> trusted reviewer base, but the hope is that over time the reviewer pool
> size grows enough to make the effort worthwhile...
>
>
> >> Cc:
> >>
> >
> > * Used by original submitter to denote additional maintainers it goes to
> > * Parties who should be Cced when an a posteriori question comes up
> >
>
> Well, any interested parties, really. I use it for original bug
> reporters, people who followed up on the report, people who have patches
> in a nearby area, people who are known to be interested in the affected
> subsystem, people who have reviewed previous versions of the patch, etc...

---
~Randy