Re: Incentives for review

[Thiago Jung Bauermann]

Hello,

Em terça-feira, 19 de outubro de 2021, às 12:41:23 -03, Ludovic Courtès 
escreveu:
> zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com> skribis:
> > On Tue, 19 Oct 2021 at 14:56, Ludovic Courtès 
<ludovic.courtes@inria.fr> wrote:
> [...]
> 
> 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.

Thank you for viewing it from that angle. On a personal note, I’m aware 
that my ratio of patches reviewed / patches posted approaches zero and this 
makes me a bit uncomfortable every time I type `git send-email`.

Sometimes I try to review patches, but it’s not a very productive endeavour 
for a few reasons:

1. In many cases, I don’t see anything wrong with the patch I’m looking at. 
In those cases I could reply saying so, but I refrain from doing that 
because if such message comes from someone who doesn’t have much experience 
in the part of Guix that the patch touches (which is almost always the case 
for me when reviewing patches), then how much values does that really add?

2. Going through the guix-patches mailing list looking for submissions that 
touch the few areas of Guix where I have at least some experience. I don’t 
think I found an effective method yet (in part the problem is on my side 
because the search function of the email client I use isn’t very reliable).

> 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.

I like the ‘Reviewed-by’ idea and I agree that it provides a tangible 
incentive. A ‘Tested-by:’ tag would have the same effect as well, as 
suggested by simon.

> Perhaps there are other things we could do?

One thing that would help me would be some way to “subscribe” to changes in 
certain areas of Guix. That way, when a patch is submitted which touches 
those areas I would be automatically copied on the emails that go to the 
guix-patches mailing list. “areas of Guix” could be defined by paths in the 
repo, guile modules or regexps matching package names, for example.

-- 
Thanks,
Thiago