[maemo-developers] Proposal: code review process for community SSU

[From: Alberto Mardegan]

On 02/07/2011 02:24 PM, Andrew Flegg wrote:
> Surely these are solved and/or solvable? Your preference may be for
> the ML, but I would suspect that's a personal preference.
>
> For example, Gitorious is _supposed_ to allow effective code review:
>
>      http://blog.gitorious.org/2009/11/06/awesome-code-review/
>
> I'd find it hard for you to find a problem with that which wouldn't
> affect an email!

I don't find it that hard. :-) You cannot put inline comments when the diff is 
big (it's some problem in jQuery, it I understood correctly).

But I actually don't mind if the community decides to settle on gitorious code 
reviews. We might miss some of the expertise we have in maemo-developers, but if 
it eases contributions, why not.

What is important is to have code reviews *before merge requests are accepted*.
I don't want to force a troublesome process, but for instance a recommendation 
of waiting a couple of days before pulling merge requests into the master branch 
would be pretty reasonable.

>> People in maemo-developers. I'd be one, for sure. Besides, as I wrote
>> before, there are several gurus there who have always been helpful and
>> that happen to be the original writers of that software.
>
> Occasionally looking at a commit is different to committing (no pun
> intended) to review every change so that there's not a bottleneck.

Sure, they are different things indeed. But both are better than nothing.

> Well, going back to 80s style code review on a mailing list is a big
> change in effort IMHO. However, as noted on the wiki, development
> processes are one of the many things to define.

"Going back"? If you consider that at the moment we have nothing, I would rather 
call it "going forward". If then people find gitorious review system easier to 
work with, then let's go for it, and call it "going forward further". :-)

> Currently I think the second is primarily happening, with Mohammad
> acting as reviewer and maintainer for all the packages. Whether or not
> his standards correspond to yours is a different question as to
> whether or not code review is happening ;-)

True. I'd just like to have code reviews as widely public as possible. I frankly 
didn't know about gitorious e-mail notifications [0], I just found this link by 
googling while replying to this e-mail. If it works fine then we could recommend 
it to every CSSU developer/reviewer.

Ciao,
   Alberto

[0]: http://gitorious.org/favorites

-- 
http://blog.mardy.it <-- geek in un lingua international!