Hi ,
In the last Community Health
Initiative<https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=345377343>
we talked of improving the Flink process to involve development review.
@Robert Metzger<mailto:[email protected]> suggested I raise a Flip for this.
Prior to raising the Flip I would like to have a conversation on the dev list
to see what people thought and assess the support for this proposed change.
Motivation for flip
There are many Flink contributors and fewer committers. As a community we want
to drive down our technical debt. The committers can be time strapped, so may
not have enough time to review every PR that comes in. There are members of the
community that are willing to review PRs and appropriately share the review
burden. This activity has been occurring under the Community Health Initiative,
where every new PR since the start of the group has been reviewed / triaged.
This proposal is to formally create a process where the community
(non-committers) can review PRs and ease the load on the committers. The
benefits of this approach are:
* we formally encourage the community to review PRs - making this one of
the things we do as a community.
* encouraging the community to review will get more eyes on code changes.
* easing the burden of review for committers
* for straight forward PRs that the community approves of
* identify PRs if they need expert assessment
* community reviewing then becomes a way to contribute to Flink on the road
to becoming a committer. So, it is in the contributor’s interest to review
* measuring community review activity gives us metrics to show its impact
and whether the process is working.
Proposal for Flip
Use Flinkbot commands to add new labels to indicate that the community has
reviewed a PR.
Suggested new labels
* community-reviewed-LGTM
This can be set if there are 2 committer approves
* community-reviewed-required-deep-review
This could be set if 2 community members agree that a deep review is required.
* Community-health-initiative-reviewed
A tag to indicate that the Community Health Initiative has reviewed the PR
The by-produce of this process is that sanity checks (does the Jira have a
title – look right, does it have unit tests, code logic tests, does the Jira
have a decent description on what is being changed and why etc) will occur on
PRs generating lots of prompt feedback to the submitters of the PRs. Also it
is easier for committers to identify what PRs to review and merge easy changes .
In the Community Health Initiative, we hope to move as much of the sanity
checking as possible to the Flink bot, where it can be automated.
One concern about this approach is that someone could unethically put the
community review labels onto PRs without having reviewed the PR. If we see this
is occurring, then we would use usual Apache processes to deal with members of
the community not behaving well. Any thoughts on this?
I am interested in what the community thinks about this idea, and will raise a
Flip to formally discuss and vote on if there is a support for it,
Kind regards, David.
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