Re: Slow DOWN, please!!!

Rafael J. Wysocki
2008-05-01T22:18:58Z

On Thursday, 1 of May 2008, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> On Thu, May 01, 2008 at 10:41:21AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > Same goes for "we should all just spend time looking at each others
> > patches and trying to find bugs in them". That's not a solution, that's a
> > drug-induced dream you're living in.
>
> "all" above is the wrong part. Encourage each other into reviewing code
> will definitely *help* (and I did not say fix the problem, OK?). There
> are persons who regularly spend some time to review code. I'm thinking
> about Al, Andrew, Christoph, Arjan, and maybe many other ones I'm missing,
> just that I regularly see them give advices to people who post their patches
> on the list. And even if only for that, they deserve some respect, and their
> efforts must not be dismissed.
>
> Maybe they are more skilled than anyone else for this job. Maybe they're
> so much used to do it that it just takes them a few minutes each time, I
> don't know. I wish *more* people could be encouraged to do this work,
> which is very likely painful but instructive. If the current reviewers
> could give hints on how to save a lot of time to them, it may motivate
> more to follow them. I suspect that insisting on developers to post their
> less obvious work to the list(s) is a first step. Maybe at one point we're
> all responsible when we see a mail entitled "[GIT] pull request for XXX",
> we should all jump on it and ask "when and where was this code reviewed ?".
>
> Once again, it's not a fix. It's just one small step towards a saner process.
>
> > So do you have any productive *suggestions*? Some that involve more than
> > "let's write less code" or "let's just review each others patches more".
>
> It's not much about reviewing each others' patches, it's about showing
> one's work to others first. If our developers are encouraged to work
> alone in a cave late at night with itching eyes, and send their work
> at once every 2 months in a sealed envelope, we'll not solve anything.
>
> I also proposed a more repressive method incitating the ones with really
> bad scores to find crap in other's work in order to remain hidden behind
> them. You explained why it would not work. Fine.
>
> I also proposed to group merges by reduced overlapping areas, and to
> shorten the merge window and make it (at least) twice as often. Rafael
> also proposed to merge core first, then archs, which is a refined variation
> on the same principle.

That wasn't me, but the idea is also worth considering IMO.

Thanks,
Rafael