Simon Riggs <simon@2ndQuadrant.com> writes:
> All the CF manager needs to do is ensure that every patch submitted
> chalks up one review. If you think about it, we wouldn't actually need
> any rr reviewers at all then, because if we have 20 patches we would
> have 20 reviews due. So the whole scheme is self-balancing.
Well, no, that's *far* too optimistic/simplistic, because it imagines
that every review is worth the same. What we lack is not just review
time but qualified review time, ie, comments from someone who's already
familiar with the portion of the code base that's being patched.
Now when the current reviewing process was proposed, there were two
separate goals in mind. One was to take whatever incremental load
we could off the eventual committer's work, by catching obvious
mistakes, making sure the docs were up to snuff, etc. The other was
the idea that reviewing would in itself improve the skills of our
development community, by making people read code that they wouldn't
have read otherwise, and that eventually we'd have more committer-grade
people just because of all the reviewing they'd done. (The jury is
still out on whether that will work, but in any case it's a long-term
project.)
The problem at the moment seems to not be lack of first-level review
time but lack of qualified review. I don't know what we do about that.
Requiring people who have submitted one or two patches to do reviews
isn't going to produce more of the latter, it's going to produce more
of the former. Especially if the patches available to be reviewed
are working in areas they haven't looked at before.
regards, tom lane
