On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 9:51 PM, Martin Pool <[email protected]> wrote: > On 21 October 2010 02:18, Deryck Hodge <[email protected]> wrote: >> To be clear about my skepticism, it's that I think most of our >> friction over reviews is that we don't have a shared understanding of >> the purpose of a review or even what code quality means (e.g. some >> think lint and formatting, others architectural issues, others module >> or function design, etc.), so I think all this experiment will show us >> is the number of people who opt out of review. :-) Also, I don't have >> some great fear of plummeting code quality. We're all responsible >> adults here. :-) I guess it's more that I worry about inconsistent >> practices and statements, i.e. "we value peer-reviewed code, but you >> don't have to do it if you don't want to." > > I said to somebody the other day that I care more about using reviews > to improve contributors than to improve code. What I mean is that > it's less important to me that every contribution be as clean as > possible than that every contributor internalizes a shared model of > what is desirable in code (all the way from whitespace through to > architecture), and that they find participation to be fun. > > I think people can have some fear that if reviews aren't strict, the > code will become incoherent or hard to read. However you have to > remember that new contributors who aren't familiar with our practices > are very likely to be only writing small bits of code. The bulk of > the code will be done by core contributors and so the question is to > what extent they agree on and care about certain qualities, and how > much they feel they have the time/environment that lets them make > things nice. > > Code reviews can be a chance to show people how much you care about > helping them learn the code and get their change in. I feel this is > the best way to get them to come back and improve more things - much > better than holding the original patch hostage until more work is > done. > > At least as a thought experiment they could be optional for everyone. > If you have to force people to do them it suggests to me that they are > either taking too long or not focussing on things the contributor > actually finds useful. > > iow: pace jml, "I love your patch, and you too." >
Thanks for writing this, Martin. I like the sentiment that reviews are more about contributors than contributions, and I agree completely with what you've written here. I think this is why people can find our reviews frustrating, I imagine, because they can come off as blocking mechanisms rather than enabling mechanisms. Cheers, deryck -- Deryck Hodge https://launchpad.net/~deryck http://www.devurandom.org/ _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
