Hi, as you can see, pull requests are going "well", we have quite a bit of them coming in all the time, and compared to other projects, relatively small queues and wait times. Yet, this continuous flow, coupled with the chronic lack of people dedicating time to review them, makes me believe we need to do something to streamline this further.
The first choice in a community project would be to throw more "meat" at the problem, having more reviewers. This has been brought up before, and some unsolicited help (people that we don't need to call up by name to get some opinion) showed up, but imho we are not nearly enough yet. I am wondering, would it help if we added in the wiki a review guide? Would that make more people show up to do reviews? If not that, what will? Another issue is that some come out of the blue and propose deep changes, or large refactors, making them very hard to review, as in, demanding the reviewer to literally spend several hours of their spare time on a single pull request just to handle aestetics/class structure changes, connect the dots and figure out if the change is actually an improvement or not. Shall we just add to the list of pull request criterias "keep changes to a minimum, be mindful of those reviewing them"? Other ideas? Moving on, there is a number of people making pull request with changes that are so focused on their specific issue that it's hard if not impossible to merge the changes, because they don't see the big picture and are causing regressions in other use cases. Again, maybe we should just write in docs in a more evident way to discuss before proposing changes, in order to avoid the above? Or ask people to consider all ways the code they are using can be leveraged, and not just their particular use case? What else? Finally, another source of pain is that the core developer doing the review is held responsible for the changes being merged, while the person proposing the pull request should be instead. Now, we cannot have these people contributing pull requests be responsible forever, but could we setup some policy that if anything goes wrong with the pull request, they are supposed to be around and help fixing the mess, for some amount of time (like, don't know, 2 to 6 months?). If they are not, the commits just get reverted instead (assuming it's possible, sometimes it will not be). Also, it would be great if we could ask them to sit on the user list to answer of their changes to the user base, for the same amount of time (right now it's pretty much the core dev that merged the pull doing that, which is also unfair). This would be mostly for new features/large changes, not for bug fixes, although I would really love to have the responsible be grilled by the angry users when a so called bug fix causes some important regression. That's what I have, any other idea is course more than welcomed :-) Cheers Andrea -- == GeoServer Professional Services from the experts! Visit http://goo.gl/it488V for more information. == *Geosolutions' Winter Holidays from 24/12 to 6/1* Ing. Andrea Aime @geowolf Technical Lead GeoSolutions S.A.S. Via Poggio alle Viti 1187 55054 Massarosa (LU) Italy phone: +39 0584 962313 fax: +39 0584 1660272 mob: +39 339 8844549 http://www.geo-solutions.it http://twitter.com/geosolutions_it *AVVERTENZE AI SENSI DEL D.Lgs. 196/2003* Le informazioni contenute in questo messaggio di posta elettronica e/o nel/i file/s allegato/i sono da considerarsi strettamente riservate. Il loro utilizzo è consentito esclusivamente al destinatario del messaggio, per le finalità indicate nel messaggio stesso. Qualora riceviate questo messaggio senza esserne il destinatario, Vi preghiamo cortesemente di darcene notizia via e-mail e di procedere alla distruzione del messaggio stesso, cancellandolo dal Vostro sistema. Conservare il messaggio stesso, divulgarlo anche in parte, distribuirlo ad altri soggetti, copiarlo, od utilizzarlo per finalità diverse, costituisce comportamento contrario ai principi dettati dal D.Lgs. 196/2003. The information in this message and/or attachments, is intended solely for the attention and use of the named addressee(s) and may be confidential or proprietary in nature or covered by the provisions of privacy act (Legislative Decree June, 30 2003, no.196 - Italy's New Data Protection Code).Any use not in accord with its purpose, any disclosure, reproduction, copying, distribution, or either dissemination, either whole or partial, is strictly forbidden except previous formal approval of the named addressee(s). If you are not the intended recipient, please contact immediately the sender by telephone, fax or e-mail and delete the information in this message that has been received in error. The sender does not give any warranty or accept liability as the content, accuracy or completeness of sent messages and accepts no responsibility for changes made after they were sent or for other risks which arise as a result of e-mail transmission, viruses, etc. -------------------------------------------------------
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