Incentives for review

[Ludovic Courtès]

zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com> skribis:

> On Tue, 19 Oct 2021 at 14:56, Ludovic Courtès <ludovic.courtes@inria.fr> 
> wrote:

[...]

> One question is “encouragement” for reviewing, somehow.  Asking for new
> package additions to go via guix-patches is a call making kind of
> equality between contributors.  As someone without commit access, I can
> tell you that it is often demotivating to send a trivial addition, wait
> forever, ping people (aside I know who I have to ping :-)).  Usually, it
> means people are busy elsewhere, so I try to help to reduce the workload
> by reviewing stuff or by doing bug triage.  However, in the same time, I
> see committers push their own trivial additions.  It appears to me
> “unfair”.

I understand and sympathize (I also see us slipping off-topic :-)).

> Why are committer’s trivial additions more “urgent” than mine?

Yeah, I see what you mean.

I would like to see us committers do more review work.  But I also view
things from a different angle: everyone contributes in their own way,
and each contribution is a gift.  We can insist on community
expectations (reviewing other people’s work), but we should also welcome
contributions as they come.

There’s a balance to be found between no formal commitment on behalf of
committers, and a strict and codified commitment similar to what is
required for participation in the distros list¹.

A good middle ground may be to provide incentives for review.  How?  I’m
not sure exactly, but first by making it clear that review is makes the
project move forward and is invaluable.  You once proposed having
‘Reviewed-By’ tags to acknowledge non-committer reviews, and I think
that would be one step in that direction.  Perhaps there are other
things we could do?

[...]

>> I think it’s about finding the right balance to be reasonably efficient
>> while not compromising on quality.
>
> I totally agree.  And I do not see nor understand where is the
> inefficiency here when asking to go via guix-patches and wait two weeks
> for adding a new package.

It’s not about urgency but rather about not contributing to the growth
of our patch backlog, which is a real problem.

Thanks,
Ludo’.

¹ https://oss-security.openwall.org/wiki/mailing-lists/distros