Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns
On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 4:07 AM, Pedro Roque Marques pedro.r.marq...@gmail.com wrote: Radomir, An extra issue that i don't believe you've covered so far is about comment ownership. I've just read an email on the list that follows a pattern that i've heard many complaints about: -1 with a reasonable comment, submitter addresses the comment, reviewer never comes back. Reviewers do need to allocate time to come back and follow up on the answers to their comments. This is true, but it's not necessarily easy to find those reviews that you -1'd. I don't think anyone nefariously -1's and then goes away. Gerrit could be improved in this space to assist reviewers. -- Michael Davies mich...@the-davies.net Rackspace Cloud Builders Australia ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns
On Sun, Nov 10, 2013 at 3:50 PM, Sean Dague s...@dague.net wrote: Not that I know of. I've considered writing my own gerrit front end mail service to do just that, because I agree, the current mail volume and granularity is not very good. If I manage to carve time on it, I'll do it on stackforge. Joe Gordon took a different approach and wrote a front end client to mark review threads read that are past. https://github.com/jogo/gerrit-gmail On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 8:40 PM, David Ripton drip...@redhat.com wrote: On 11/07/2013 07:54 PM, Sean Dague wrote: On 11/08/2013 01:37 AM, Pedro Roque Marques wrote: Radomir, An extra issue that i don't believe you've covered so far is about comment ownership. I've just read an email on the list that follows a pattern that i've heard many complaints about: -1 with a reasonable comment, submitter addresses the comment, reviewer never comes back. Reviewers do need to allocate time to come back and follow up on the answers to their comments. Perhaps there is an issue with the incentive system. You can earn karma by doing a code review... certainly you want to incentivise developers that help the project by improving the code quality. But if the incentive system allows for drive by shooting code reviews that can be a problem. It's not really an incentive system problem, this is some place where there are some gerrit limitations (especially when your list of reviewed code is long). Hopefully once we get a gerrit upgrade we can dashboard out some new items like that via the new rest API. I agree that reviewers could be doing better. But definitely also realize that part of this is just that there is *so* much code to review. Realize that most core reviewers aren't ignoring or failing to come back on patches intentionally. There is just *so* much of it. I feel guilty all the time by how big a review queue I have, but I also need a few hours a day not doing OpenStack (incredible to believe). This is where non core reviewers can really help in addressing the first couple of rounds of review to prune and improve the easy stuff. We're all in this together, Is there a way for Gerrit to only send email when action is required, rather than on any change to any review you've touched? If Gerrit sent less mail, it would be easier to treat its mails as a critical call to action to re-review. (There's probably a way to use fancy message filtering to accomplish this, but that would only work for people willing/able to set up such filtering.) -- David Ripton Red Hat drip...@redhat.com ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev -- Sean Dague http://dague.net ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns
On Nov 11, 2013, at 11:27 AM, Joe Gordon joe.gord...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Nov 10, 2013 at 3:50 PM, Sean Dague s...@dague.net wrote: Not that I know of. I've considered writing my own gerrit front end mail service to do just that, because I agree, the current mail volume and granularity is not very good. If I manage to carve time on it, I'll do it on stackforge. Joe Gordon took a different approach and wrote a front end client to mark review threads read that are past. https://github.com/jogo/gerrit-gmail Joe described this to me, and it sounded hawt. Thanks for sending this out. From what I gather it auto marks email as read based on merges and abandons. Joe, are there any dependencies, workflows, insights you can share wrt this?___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns
On Fri, 2013-11-08 at 09:32 +1300, Robert Collins wrote: On 7 November 2013 13:15, Day, Phil philip@hp.com wrote: Core reviewers look for the /comments/ from people, not just the votes. A +1 from someone that isn't core is meaningless unless they are known to be a thoughtful code reviewer. A -1 with no comment is also bad, because it doesn't help the reviewee get whatever the issue is fixed. It's very much not OK to spend an hour reviewing something and then +1 with no comment: if I, and I think any +2er across the project see a patch that needs an hour of review, with a commentless +1, we'll likely discount the +1 as being meaningful. I don't really get what you're saying here Rob. It seems to me an almost inevitable part of the review process that useful comments are going to be mostly negative. If someone has invested that amount of effort because the patch is complex, or It took then a while to work their way back into that part of the systems, etc, but having given the code careful consideration they decide it's good - do you want comments in there saying I really like your code, Well done on fixing such a complex problem or some such ? Negative comments are fine: I was saying that statistically, having an hour-long patch (which BTW puts it waaay past the diminishing returns on patch size tradeoff) to review and then having nothing at all to say about it is super suspect. Sure, having nothing to say on a 10 line patch - hit a +1, move on. But something that takes an hour to review? I'd expect at minimum the thing to prompt some suggestions *even while it gets a +1*. I just don't see how you can use a lack or presence of positive feedback in a +1 as any sort of indication on the quality of that +1. Unless you start asking reviewers to précis the change in their own words to show that they understood it I don't really see how additional positive comments help in most cases. Perhaps if you have some specific examples of this it would help to clarify It might even be negative feedback. Like - this patch is correct but the fact it had to be done as one patch shows our code structure here is wonky. If you could follow up with something to let us avoid future mammoth patches, that would be awesome. Again, I'm talking about hour long reviews, which is the example Radomir gave. Another way of presenting what I'm saying is this: Code reviews are a dialogue. How often in a discussion with a live human would you have no feedback at all, if they were reading a speech to you. You might go 'that was a great speech' (+2) and *still* have something to add. As an observer given a very long speech, and an audience, I'd suspect folk went to sleep if they didn't have commentary :) Totally agree with you here. I almost completely discount +1s with no comments on a large patch. I make a habit of leaving comments in reviews - positive, negative, neutral, whatever. If I have something to say which might be useful to the author, other reviewers, my future self, whatever ... then I'll say it. e.g. if I spend 10 minutes looking at one part of a patch, ultimately convincing myself that there really is no better approach and the author has made the right tradeoffs ... then I'll say it. I'll briefly describe the tradeoffs, the other options that I guess the author considered and discounted. I sometimes feel guilty about this because I know patch authors just want their +2 and often don't want to read through my verbiage ... but, as you say, this is a dialogue and the dialogue can yield some interesting thoughts and ideas. Mark. ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns
On Thu, 2013-11-07 at 20:40 -0500, David Ripton wrote: On 11/07/2013 07:54 PM, Sean Dague wrote: On 11/08/2013 01:37 AM, Pedro Roque Marques wrote: Radomir, An extra issue that i don't believe you've covered so far is about comment ownership. I've just read an email on the list that follows a pattern that i've heard many complaints about: -1 with a reasonable comment, submitter addresses the comment, reviewer never comes back. Reviewers do need to allocate time to come back and follow up on the answers to their comments. Perhaps there is an issue with the incentive system. You can earn karma by doing a code review... certainly you want to incentivise developers that help the project by improving the code quality. But if the incentive system allows for drive by shooting code reviews that can be a problem. It's not really an incentive system problem, this is some place where there are some gerrit limitations (especially when your list of reviewed code is long). Hopefully once we get a gerrit upgrade we can dashboard out some new items like that via the new rest API. I agree that reviewers could be doing better. But definitely also realize that part of this is just that there is *so* much code to review. Realize that most core reviewers aren't ignoring or failing to come back on patches intentionally. There is just *so* much of it. I feel guilty all the time by how big a review queue I have, but I also need a few hours a day not doing OpenStack (incredible to believe). This is where non core reviewers can really help in addressing the first couple of rounds of review to prune and improve the easy stuff. We're all in this together, Is there a way for Gerrit to only send email when action is required, rather than on any change to any review you've touched? If Gerrit sent less mail, it would be easier to treat its mails as a critical call to action to re-review. (There's probably a way to use fancy message filtering to accomplish this, but that would only work for people willing/able to set up such filtering.) I know you're discounting filtering here, but FWIW I filter on the email body containing: Gerrit-Reviewer: Mark McLoughlin so that I have all email related to reviews I'm subscribed to in a single folder. I try hard to stay on top of this folder to avoid being a drive-by-reviewer. I group the mails by thread, so I don't mind all the email gerrit sends out but if e.g. I wanted to only see notifications of new patch sets I'd filter on: Gerrit-MessageType: newpatchset Mark. ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns
Not that I know of. I've considered writing my own gerrit front end mail service to do just that, because I agree, the current mail volume and granularity is not very good. If I manage to carve time on it, I'll do it on stackforge. Joe Gordon took a different approach and wrote a front end client to mark review threads read that are past. On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 8:40 PM, David Ripton drip...@redhat.com wrote: On 11/07/2013 07:54 PM, Sean Dague wrote: On 11/08/2013 01:37 AM, Pedro Roque Marques wrote: Radomir, An extra issue that i don't believe you've covered so far is about comment ownership. I've just read an email on the list that follows a pattern that i've heard many complaints about: -1 with a reasonable comment, submitter addresses the comment, reviewer never comes back. Reviewers do need to allocate time to come back and follow up on the answers to their comments. Perhaps there is an issue with the incentive system. You can earn karma by doing a code review... certainly you want to incentivise developers that help the project by improving the code quality. But if the incentive system allows for drive by shooting code reviews that can be a problem. It's not really an incentive system problem, this is some place where there are some gerrit limitations (especially when your list of reviewed code is long). Hopefully once we get a gerrit upgrade we can dashboard out some new items like that via the new rest API. I agree that reviewers could be doing better. But definitely also realize that part of this is just that there is *so* much code to review. Realize that most core reviewers aren't ignoring or failing to come back on patches intentionally. There is just *so* much of it. I feel guilty all the time by how big a review queue I have, but I also need a few hours a day not doing OpenStack (incredible to believe). This is where non core reviewers can really help in addressing the first couple of rounds of review to prune and improve the easy stuff. We're all in this together, Is there a way for Gerrit to only send email when action is required, rather than on any change to any review you've touched? If Gerrit sent less mail, it would be easier to treat its mails as a critical call to action to re-review. (There's probably a way to use fancy message filtering to accomplish this, but that would only work for people willing/able to set up such filtering.) -- David Ripton Red Hat drip...@redhat.com ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev -- Sean Dague http://dague.net ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns
On 06/11/13 23:07, Robert Collins wrote: On 6 November 2013 21:34, Radomir Dopieralski openst...@sheep.art.pl wrote: [...] Firstly, things like code duplication is a sliding scale, and I think it's ok for a reviewer to say 'these look similar, give it a go please'. If the reviewee tries, and it's no good - thats fine. But saying 'hey, I won't even try' - thats not so good. Many times we get drive-by patches and no follow up, so there is a learnt response to require full satisfaction with each patch that comes in. Regular contributors get more leeway here I think. This is of course a gut feeling thing, and different people have different thresholds for when to deduplicate code. I came up with that pattern for myself, because my feelings about the code often didn't match the feelings of the rest of the team. Please note that the fact that I notice a bad pattern in my review doesn't immediately mean I shouldn't do it -- just that it is suspect and I should rethink it. So, if it's a blatant copy-paste of code, of course I will point it out. If the patch includes code that could be easily replaced by an existing utility function, that the author might not know about, of course I will point it out. But if the code is similar to some other code in some other part of the project, I will try to treat it the same way as when I spot a bug that is not related to the patch during the review -- either follow up with a patch of my own, or report a bug if I don't have time for this (this has a nice side effect of producing the low-hanging-fruit bugs that teach refactoring to newcomers). I think it's important to remember that you can always commit to that project, so not all changes need to be mde by that single author (especially in OpenStack, where you have the marvelous option of amending someone else's patch). [...] This is quite obvious. Just don't do it. It's OK to spend an hour reviewing something, and then leaving no comments on it, because it's simply fine, or because we had to means to test someting (see the first pattern). Core reviewers look for the /comments/ from people, not just the votes. A +1 from someone that isn't core is meaningless unless they are known to be a thoughtful code reviewer. A -1 with no comment is also bad, because it doesn't help the reviewee get whatever the issue is fixed. It's very much not OK to spend an hour reviewing something and then +1 with no comment: if I, and I think any +2er across the project see a patch that needs an hour of review, with a commentless +1, we'll likely discount the +1 as being meaningful. That is a very good point! We want reviews that have useful comments in them, so it is indeed a very good rule of thumb to always ask yourself Is this comment that I am posting helpful?. What I meant here is that if I do a review, and even after spending a lot of time on it, can't come up with anything that would actually help the author make it a better patch, then it is fine to not post anything at all, including no score. I suppose it would be nice to +1 it if you find it basically fine, but we didn't have separate +1s and +2s in my previous project. -- Radomir Dopieralski ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns
On 11/07/2013 08:25 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote: On Thu, Nov 07, 2013 at 12:21:38AM +, Day, Phil wrote: Leaving a mark. === You review a change and see that it is mostly fine, but you feel that since you did so much work reviewing it, you should at least find *something* wrong. So you find some nitpick and -1 the change just so that they know you reviewed it. This is quite obvious. Just don't do it. It's OK to spend an hour reviewing something, and then leaving no comments on it, because it's simply fine, or because we had to means to test someting (see the first pattern). Another one that comes into this category is adding a -1 which just says I agree with the other -1's in here. If you have some additional perspective and can expand on it then that's fine - otherwise it adds very little and is just review count chasing. I don't think that it is valueless as you describe. If I multiple people add '-1' with a same comments as name, then as a core reviewer I will consider that initial -1 to be a much stronger nack, than if only one person had added the -1. So I welcome people adding I agree with blah to any review. It's an unfortunate consequence of counting and publishing review stats that having such a measure will inevitable also drive behavour. IMHO what this shows is not people trying to game the stats, but rather the inadequacy of gerrit. We don't have any way to distinguish a -1 minor nice to have nitpick from a -1 serious code issue that is a must-fix. Adding a -2 is really too heavyweight because it is sticky, and implies do not ever merge this. It would be nice to be able to use '-2' for serious must-fix issue without it being sticky, and have a separate way for core reviewers to put an review into a block from being merged indefinitely state - perhaps a new state would be more useful eg a Blocked state, to add to New, Open, Merged, Abadoned. Daniel The comment describing the -1 should be enough to distinquish between minor nitpick and serious code issue IMHO. If it is a serious issue, other reviewers also giving -1 confirming the issue is probably a good thing. (Not with the minor nit though...) Jirka ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns
On 7 November 2013 13:15, Day, Phil philip@hp.com wrote: Core reviewers look for the /comments/ from people, not just the votes. A +1 from someone that isn't core is meaningless unless they are known to be a thoughtful code reviewer. A -1 with no comment is also bad, because it doesn't help the reviewee get whatever the issue is fixed. It's very much not OK to spend an hour reviewing something and then +1 with no comment: if I, and I think any +2er across the project see a patch that needs an hour of review, with a commentless +1, we'll likely discount the +1 as being meaningful. I don't really get what you're saying here Rob. It seems to me an almost inevitable part of the review process that useful comments are going to be mostly negative. If someone has invested that amount of effort because the patch is complex, or It took then a while to work their way back into that part of the systems, etc, but having given the code careful consideration they decide it's good - do you want comments in there saying I really like your code, Well done on fixing such a complex problem or some such ? Negative comments are fine: I was saying that statistically, having an hour-long patch (which BTW puts it waaay past the diminishing returns on patch size tradeoff) to review and then having nothing at all to say about it is super suspect. Sure, having nothing to say on a 10 line patch - hit a +1, move on. But something that takes an hour to review? I'd expect at minimum the thing to prompt some suggestions *even while it gets a +1*. I just don't see how you can use a lack or presence of positive feedback in a +1 as any sort of indication on the quality of that +1. Unless you start asking reviewers to précis the change in their own words to show that they understood it I don't really see how additional positive comments help in most cases. Perhaps if you have some specific examples of this it would help to clarify It might even be negative feedback. Like - this patch is correct but the fact it had to be done as one patch shows our code structure here is wonky. If you could follow up with something to let us avoid future mammoth patches, that would be awesome. Again, I'm talking about hour long reviews, which is the example Radomir gave. Another way of presenting what I'm saying is this: Code reviews are a dialogue. How often in a discussion with a live human would you have no feedback at all, if they were reading a speech to you. You might go 'that was a great speech' (+2) and *still* have something to add. As an observer given a very long speech, and an audience, I'd suspect folk went to sleep if they didn't have commentary :) -Rob -- Robert Collins rbtcoll...@hp.com Distinguished Technologist HP Converged Cloud ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns
On 8 November 2013 00:02, Radomir Dopieralski openst...@sheep.art.pl wrote: I created a page on the wiki, https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/CodeReviewGuidelines I put some initial content there, based on the discussion in this thread. Please feel free to discuss those points further here, and to amend that page and add to it. Thank you. I thought we might have a similar page already, but I only found: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/ReviewChecklist [what to look for] and https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/ReviewWorkflowTips [what reviewees should do] I suspect we probably need to tie all three together somehow. Any ideas of where we could put a link to it? I'm thinking about the Gerrit Workflow page, maybe also some pages specific to particular teams (I've seen there is a page with review tips for Nova). So https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Gerrit_Workflow and the ReviewWorkflowTips page above overlap a lot. I think we should merge ReviewWorkflowTips into Gerrit_Workflow, and link to the review checklist and guidlines pages from Gerrit_Workflow. -Rob -- Robert Collins rbtcoll...@hp.com Distinguished Technologist HP Converged Cloud ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns
On 11/07/2013 01:56 PM, James Bottomley wrote: On Thu, 2013-11-07 at 00:21 +, Day, Phil wrote: Leaving a mark. === You review a change and see that it is mostly fine, but you feel that since you did so much work reviewing it, you should at least find *something* wrong. So you find some nitpick and -1 the change just so that they know you reviewed it. This is quite obvious. Just don't do it. It's OK to spend an hour reviewing something, and then leaving no comments on it, because it's simply fine, or because we had to means to test someting (see the first pattern). Another one that comes into this category is adding a -1 which just says I agree with the other -1's in here. If you have some additional perspective and can expand on it then that's fine - otherwise it adds very little and is just review count chasing. It's an unfortunate consequence of counting and publishing review stats that having such a measure will inevitable also drive behavour. Perhaps a source of the problem is early voting. Feeling pressure to add a +/-1 (or even 2) without fully asking what's going on in the code leads to premature adjudication. For instance, I have to do a lot of reviews in SCSI; I'm a subject matter expert, so I do recognise some bad coding patterns and ask for them to be changed unconditionally, but a lot of the time I don't necessarily understand why the code was done in the way it was, so I ask. Before I get the answer I'm not really qualified to judge the merits. +1 to this. Realistically if I have questions in the code and am unsure how I'd score it I'll often leave a 0 review with questions inline to help me understand. I consider this generally good form, and it's helpful to everyone in the learning process about the code. -Sean -- Sean Dague http://dague.net signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns
On 11/07/2013 05:35 PM, Jiri Tomasek wrote: On 11/07/2013 08:25 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote: On Thu, Nov 07, 2013 at 12:21:38AM +, Day, Phil wrote: Leaving a mark. === You review a change and see that it is mostly fine, but you feel that since you did so much work reviewing it, you should at least find *something* wrong. So you find some nitpick and -1 the change just so that they know you reviewed it. This is quite obvious. Just don't do it. It's OK to spend an hour reviewing something, and then leaving no comments on it, because it's simply fine, or because we had to means to test someting (see the first pattern). Another one that comes into this category is adding a -1 which just says I agree with the other -1's in here. If you have some additional perspective and can expand on it then that's fine - otherwise it adds very little and is just review count chasing. I don't think that it is valueless as you describe. If I multiple people add '-1' with a same comments as name, then as a core reviewer I will consider that initial -1 to be a much stronger nack, than if only one person had added the -1. So I welcome people adding I agree with blah to any review. It's an unfortunate consequence of counting and publishing review stats that having such a measure will inevitable also drive behavour. IMHO what this shows is not people trying to game the stats, but rather the inadequacy of gerrit. We don't have any way to distinguish a -1 minor nice to have nitpick from a -1 serious code issue that is a must-fix. Adding a -2 is really too heavyweight because it is sticky, and implies do not ever merge this. It would be nice to be able to use '-2' for serious must-fix issue without it being sticky, and have a separate way for core reviewers to put an review into a block from being merged indefinitely state - perhaps a new state would be more useful eg a Blocked state, to add to New, Open, Merged, Abadoned. Daniel The comment describing the -1 should be enough to distinquish between minor nitpick and serious code issue IMHO. If it is a serious issue, other reviewers also giving -1 confirming the issue is probably a good thing. (Not with the minor nit though...) Agreed, the comments are there for a reason. It's also handy to provide forward looking statements to other reviewers in case you don't get back to the review queue right away. For instance when I know that might happen I tend to leave comments like I'm +2 after the following is addressed. That's also extremely helpful to provide incentive to the submitter to make those kinds of changes. Not all submissions fit into this kind of category, some really need to iterate through sets of issues to get ready for the code base. But when they are close, defining the end state for the contributor and other reviewers that won't feel like they need to wait for your comments on the updated review (because you clearly explained what you thought needed to change) is helpful. -Sean -- Sean Dague http://dague.net signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns
On 11/08/2013 01:37 AM, Pedro Roque Marques wrote: Radomir, An extra issue that i don't believe you've covered so far is about comment ownership. I've just read an email on the list that follows a pattern that i've heard many complaints about: -1 with a reasonable comment, submitter addresses the comment, reviewer never comes back. Reviewers do need to allocate time to come back and follow up on the answers to their comments. Perhaps there is an issue with the incentive system. You can earn karma by doing a code review... certainly you want to incentivise developers that help the project by improving the code quality. But if the incentive system allows for drive by shooting code reviews that can be a problem. It's not really an incentive system problem, this is some place where there are some gerrit limitations (especially when your list of reviewed code is long). Hopefully once we get a gerrit upgrade we can dashboard out some new items like that via the new rest API. I agree that reviewers could be doing better. But definitely also realize that part of this is just that there is *so* much code to review. Realize that most core reviewers aren't ignoring or failing to come back on patches intentionally. There is just *so* much of it. I feel guilty all the time by how big a review queue I have, but I also need a few hours a day not doing OpenStack (incredible to believe). This is where non core reviewers can really help in addressing the first couple of rounds of review to prune and improve the easy stuff. We're all in this together, -Sean -- Sean Dague http://dague.net signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns
On 11/07/2013 07:54 PM, Sean Dague wrote: On 11/08/2013 01:37 AM, Pedro Roque Marques wrote: Radomir, An extra issue that i don't believe you've covered so far is about comment ownership. I've just read an email on the list that follows a pattern that i've heard many complaints about: -1 with a reasonable comment, submitter addresses the comment, reviewer never comes back. Reviewers do need to allocate time to come back and follow up on the answers to their comments. Perhaps there is an issue with the incentive system. You can earn karma by doing a code review... certainly you want to incentivise developers that help the project by improving the code quality. But if the incentive system allows for drive by shooting code reviews that can be a problem. It's not really an incentive system problem, this is some place where there are some gerrit limitations (especially when your list of reviewed code is long). Hopefully once we get a gerrit upgrade we can dashboard out some new items like that via the new rest API. I agree that reviewers could be doing better. But definitely also realize that part of this is just that there is *so* much code to review. Realize that most core reviewers aren't ignoring or failing to come back on patches intentionally. There is just *so* much of it. I feel guilty all the time by how big a review queue I have, but I also need a few hours a day not doing OpenStack (incredible to believe). This is where non core reviewers can really help in addressing the first couple of rounds of review to prune and improve the easy stuff. We're all in this together, Is there a way for Gerrit to only send email when action is required, rather than on any change to any review you've touched? If Gerrit sent less mail, it would be easier to treat its mails as a critical call to action to re-review. (There's probably a way to use fancy message filtering to accomplish this, but that would only work for people willing/able to set up such filtering.) -- David Ripton Red Hat drip...@redhat.com ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns
+1 Regards -Harshad On Nov 6, 2013, at 12:36 AM, Radomir Dopieralski openst...@sheep.art.pl wrote: Hello, I'm quite new in the OpenStack project, but I love it already. What is especially nifty is the automated review system -- I'm really impressed. I'm coming from a project in which we also did reviews of every change -- although it was mostly manual, and just one review was enough to merge -- and at some point in that project I noticed that it is very easy to give reviews that are unhelpful, frustrating and just get in the way of the actual work. I started paying attention to how I am reviewing code, and I managed to come up with several patterns that are bad. Once I know the patterns, it's easier to recognize when I'm doing something wrong and rethink the review. I would like to share the patterns that I noticed. Not sure if that works... = You see some suspicious piece of code, and you are not sure if it is correct or not. So you point it out in the review and -1 it, demanding that the author rechecks it and/or prove that it indeed works. It's your job as a reviewer to check such things, don't put all the effort on the author. They probably already checked that this code works, and possibly have even written tests for it. If you are not familiar with the technology enough to tell whether it's good or not, and have no means of testig it yourself, you shouldn't be reviewing it. If you do have the means to test it or can find the piece of documentation that says that it shouldn't be done -- do it as a part of the review. You ain't gonna need it. The code contains some parts that are potentially reusable later or in different areas, so you -1 it and tell the author to move them into reusable functions. The fact that you think something is reusable doesn't necessarily mean it is, and overly general code is harder to maintain. Let something repeat a couple of times just to be sure it actually is reusable. Once you find a repeating pattern, you can refactor the code to use a generalized function in its place -- in a separate change. There is an old bug here. = While you review the submitted code, you notice something wrong in the code not immediately related to the change you are reviewing. You -1 the change and tell the author to fix that bug, or formatting issue, or typo, or whatever. That fix has nothing to do with the change you are reviewing. The correct thing to do is to make a mental note of it, and fix it in a separate change -- possibly even finding more instances of it or coming up with a much better fix after seeing more code. Guess what I mean. == You notice a pep8 violation, or pep257 violation, or awkward wording of a comment or docstring, or a clumsy piece of code. You -1 the change and just tell author to fix it. It's not so easy to guess what you mean, and in case of a clumsy piece of code, not even that certain that better code can be used instead. So always provide an example of what you would rather want to see. So instead of pointing to indentation rules, just show properly indented code. Instead of talking about grammar or spelling, just type the corrected comment or docstring. Finally, instead of saying use list comprehension here or don't use has_key, just type your proposal of how the code should look like. Then we have something concrete to talk about. Of course, you can also say why you think this is better, but an example is very important. If you are not sure how the improved code would look like, just let it go, chances are it would look even worse. Not a complete fix. === The code fixes some problems (for example, fixes formatting and enables some flake8 checks), but leaves some other, related problems still not fixed. You -1 it and demand that the author adds fixes for the related problem. Don't live your coding career through the authors. If their fix is good and correct and improves the code, let it in, even if you see more opportunities to improve it. You can add those additional fixes yourself in a separate change. Or, if you don't have time or skill to do that, report a bug about the remaining problems and someone else will do it, but don't hold the author hostage with your review because you think he didn't do enough. Leaving a mark. === You review a change and see that it is mostly fine, but you feel that since you did so much work reviewing it, you should at least find *something* wrong. So you find some nitpick and -1 the change just so that they know you reviewed it. This is quite obvious. Just don't do it. It's OK to spend an hour reviewing something, and then leaving no comments on it, because it's simply fine, or because we had to means to test someting (see the first pattern). Those are the things I'm careful about myself. I'm
Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns
On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 2:34 AM, Radomir Dopieralski openst...@sheep.art.plwrote: Hello, I'm quite new in the OpenStack project, but I love it already. What is especially nifty is the automated review system -- I'm really impressed. I'm coming from a project in which we also did reviews of every change -- although it was mostly manual, and just one review was enough to merge -- and at some point in that project I noticed that it is very easy to give reviews that are unhelpful, frustrating and just get in the way of the actual work. I started paying attention to how I am reviewing code, and I managed to come up with several patterns that are bad. Once I know the patterns, it's easier to recognize when I'm doing something wrong and rethink the review. I would like to share the patterns that I noticed. Agreed on all points. I think Gerrit is nice in that it automates a lot of stuff, but unfortunately the workflow has not encouraged the best behavior for reviewers. This is a good list to follow -- but how can we be sure people will? This mailing list thread will only be seen by a small number of reviewers over the life of the project, I'm sure. -- IRC: radix Christopher Armstrong Rackspace ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns
All the points sound quite reasonable. I agree with Chris, the more reviewers read this, the better will be our review quality. Do we have some kind of reviewing guide?, if we don't this could be an start. -- irc: ajo / mangelajo Miguel Angel Ajo Pelayo +34 636 52 25 69 skype: ajoajoajo 2013/11/6 Christopher Armstrong chris.armstr...@rackspace.com On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 2:34 AM, Radomir Dopieralski openst...@sheep.art.pl wrote: Hello, I'm quite new in the OpenStack project, but I love it already. What is especially nifty is the automated review system -- I'm really impressed. I'm coming from a project in which we also did reviews of every change -- although it was mostly manual, and just one review was enough to merge -- and at some point in that project I noticed that it is very easy to give reviews that are unhelpful, frustrating and just get in the way of the actual work. I started paying attention to how I am reviewing code, and I managed to come up with several patterns that are bad. Once I know the patterns, it's easier to recognize when I'm doing something wrong and rethink the review. I would like to share the patterns that I noticed. Agreed on all points. I think Gerrit is nice in that it automates a lot of stuff, but unfortunately the workflow has not encouraged the best behavior for reviewers. This is a good list to follow -- but how can we be sure people will? This mailing list thread will only be seen by a small number of reviewers over the life of the project, I'm sure. -- IRC: radix Christopher Armstrong Rackspace ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns
This definitely should be somewhere in wiki or blog and in the bookmarks. ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns
How about putting it on a wiki and linking it from the top bar of gerrit itself? (call it review guidelines for example) That way, even people who didn't look for it explicitly could find it. Regards, Stanisław Pitucha Cloud Services Hewlett Packard -Original Message- From: Sergey Skripnick [mailto:sskripn...@mirantis.com] Sent: Wednesday, November 06, 2013 6:50 PM To: OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions) Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns This definitely should be somewhere in wiki or blog and in the bookmarks. ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns
Great thread and very insightful. Yes; please make this more accessible to other reviewers. Adding this to the wiki is a great start. Andrew Mirantis On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 11:05 AM, Pitucha, Stanislaw Izaak stanislaw.pitu...@hp.com wrote: How about putting it on a wiki and linking it from the top bar of gerrit itself? (call it review guidelines for example) That way, even people who didn't look for it explicitly could find it. Regards, Stanisław Pitucha Cloud Services Hewlett Packard -Original Message- From: Sergey Skripnick [mailto:sskripn...@mirantis.com] Sent: Wednesday, November 06, 2013 6:50 PM To: OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions) Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns This definitely should be somewhere in wiki or blog and in the bookmarks. ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev -- If google has done it, Google did it right! ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns
Well said. This will encourage new developers. On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 11:26 AM, Andrew Woodward xar...@gmail.com wrote: Great thread and very insightful. Yes; please make this more accessible to other reviewers. Adding this to the wiki is a great start. Andrew Mirantis On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 11:05 AM, Pitucha, Stanislaw Izaak stanislaw.pitu...@hp.com wrote: How about putting it on a wiki and linking it from the top bar of gerrit itself? (call it review guidelines for example) That way, even people who didn't look for it explicitly could find it. Regards, Stanisław Pitucha Cloud Services Hewlett Packard -Original Message- From: Sergey Skripnick [mailto:sskripn...@mirantis.com] Sent: Wednesday, November 06, 2013 6:50 PM To: OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions) Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns This definitely should be somewhere in wiki or blog and in the bookmarks. ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev -- If google has done it, Google did it right! ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev -- Ravi ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns
Hi! I would like do disagree with some of the points. First of all, '-1' mark may have a wrong perception especially among new contributors. -1 doesn't mean reviewers don't want your code (which is -2), it means they either not sure it is good enough or they see how you could make it better. Not sure if that works If you as a reviewer have a gut feeling ('not sure') that it may not work - put a -1. Let submitter explain it to you. You can change your score later without requiring to change the patch. Also, there are plenty of cases when the code could not be tested because it requires specific environment to run. I think it's ok to put -1 in case of uncertainty. The only thing you should care about is that such -1 is not 'finished' because you don't require submitter to change anything, so you need to check if your concerns were addressed and potentially change the score. On point #2: Let something repeat a couple of times just to be sure it actually is reusable. I think code repetition is not desirable in most of the cases and only occasionally repeating code gets merged. That happens especially when someone didn't put reusable code in a common place so others unaware of its existance. Instead of doing refactoring later on (who will do this?) just rely on reviewer's opinion and check if generalization could be done. And this can grow as a snowball (oh, he has copy-pasted his stuff, why shouldn't I do the same?) so the earlier it is caught - the better. On other points: the patch is required to be self-consistent. It needs to solve something that is stated in the bug/commit message and no more (and hopefully not less) than that. So the scope really matters. I haven't see much comments from reviewers requesting to make occasional fixes. Although sometimes it make sense to ask for such, especially if they are related, reasonable and the patch is going to be improved anyways (due to some other issues). It also may happen that submitter has missed certain things that also fall in the scope of the work he is doing. Having said that, I believe that it's not very difficult to get through a review where you get -1 for code style issues. When you have your code, IDE, git and gerrit at your hands it is a matter of minutes (hours rarely) to resolve those and resubmit. The real issue with the review process is that reviewers should back up his mark once they has put it and they not usually do that for various reasons. The worst thing to do is to put -1 and go away without leaving a chance for submitter to explain what he meant and wanted. So once a reviewer started a review (put a mark) - it is his responsibility to work further on this review. Persistent -1 should indicate that reviewer and submitter could not agree on fundamentals of the patch (design, workflow, etc), which, in turn, means, that a discussion should be held within a community before the work on the patch is continued. Thanks, Eugene. On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 11:26 PM, Andrew Woodward xar...@gmail.com wrote: Great thread and very insightful. Yes; please make this more accessible to other reviewers. Adding this to the wiki is a great start. Andrew Mirantis On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 11:05 AM, Pitucha, Stanislaw Izaak stanislaw.pitu...@hp.com wrote: How about putting it on a wiki and linking it from the top bar of gerrit itself? (call it review guidelines for example) That way, even people who didn't look for it explicitly could find it. Regards, Stanisław Pitucha Cloud Services Hewlett Packard -Original Message- From: Sergey Skripnick [mailto:sskripn...@mirantis.com] Sent: Wednesday, November 06, 2013 6:50 PM To: OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions) Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns This definitely should be somewhere in wiki or blog and in the bookmarks. ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev -- If google has done it, Google did it right! ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns
On 6 November 2013 21:34, Radomir Dopieralski openst...@sheep.art.pl wrote: Hello, I'm quite new in the OpenStack project, but I love it already. What is especially nifty is the automated review system -- I'm really impressed. I'm coming from a project in which we also did reviews of every change -- although it was mostly manual, and just one review was enough to merge -- and at some point in that project I noticed that it is very easy to give reviews that are unhelpful, frustrating and just get in the way of the actual work. I started paying attention to how I am reviewing code, and I managed to come up with several patterns that are bad. Once I know the patterns, it's easier to recognize when I'm doing something wrong and rethink the review. I would like to share the patterns that I noticed. Thank you for this, very cool. I have two nits ;). Firstly, things like code duplication is a sliding scale, and I think it's ok for a reviewer to say 'these look similar, give it a go please'. If the reviewee tries, and it's no good - thats fine. But saying 'hey, I won't even try' - thats not so good. Many times we get drive-by patches and no follow up, so there is a learnt response to require full satisfaction with each patch that comes in. Regular contributors get more leeway here I think. Secondly, this: Leaving a mark. === You review a change and see that it is mostly fine, but you feel that since you did so much work reviewing it, you should at least find *something* wrong. So you find some nitpick and -1 the change just so that they know you reviewed it. Thats indeed not cool. Perhaps a 0 with the nitpick. On the other hand, perhaps the nitpick actually matters. If it's a nitpick it's going to be what - a couple minutes to fix and push ? ... I think the real concern is that by pushing it up again you go to the back of the queue for reviews, so maybe we should talk about that instead. We don't want backpressure on folk polishing a patch on request because of review latency. This is quite obvious. Just don't do it. It's OK to spend an hour reviewing something, and then leaving no comments on it, because it's simply fine, or because we had to means to test someting (see the first pattern). Core reviewers look for the /comments/ from people, not just the votes. A +1 from someone that isn't core is meaningless unless they are known to be a thoughtful code reviewer. A -1 with no comment is also bad, because it doesn't help the reviewee get whatever the issue is fixed. It's very much not OK to spend an hour reviewing something and then +1 with no comment: if I, and I think any +2er across the project see a patch that needs an hour of review, with a commentless +1, we'll likely discount the +1 as being meaningful. -Rob -- Robert Collins rbtcoll...@hp.com Distinguished Technologist HP Converged Cloud ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns
-Original Message- From: Robert Collins [mailto:robe...@robertcollins.net] Sent: 06 November 2013 22:08 To: OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions) Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns On 6 November 2013 21:34, Radomir Dopieralski openst...@sheep.art.pl wrote: Hello, Secondly, this: Leaving a mark. === You review a change and see that it is mostly fine, but you feel that since you did so much work reviewing it, you should at least find *something* wrong. So you find some nitpick and -1 the change just so that they know you reviewed it. Thats indeed not cool. Perhaps a 0 with the nitpick. On the other hand, perhaps the nitpick actually matters. If it's a nitpick it's going to be what - a couple minutes to fix and push ? ... I think the real concern is that by pushing it up again you go to the back of the queue for reviews, so maybe we should talk about that instead. We don't want backpressure on folk polishing a patch on request because of review latency. This is quite obvious. Just don't do it. It's OK to spend an hour reviewing something, and then leaving no comments on it, because it's simply fine, or because we had to means to test someting (see the first pattern). Core reviewers look for the /comments/ from people, not just the votes. A +1 from someone that isn't core is meaningless unless they are known to be a thoughtful code reviewer. A -1 with no comment is also bad, because it doesn't help the reviewee get whatever the issue is fixed. It's very much not OK to spend an hour reviewing something and then +1 with no comment: if I, and I think any +2er across the project see a patch that needs an hour of review, with a commentless +1, we'll likely discount the +1 as being meaningful. I don't really get what you're saying here Rob. It seems to me an almost inevitable part of the review process that useful comments are going to be mostly negative. If someone has invested that amount of effort because the patch is complex, or It took then a while to work their way back into that part of the systems, etc, but having given the code careful consideration they decide it's good - do you want comments in there saying I really like your code, Well done on fixing such a complex problem or some such ? I just don't see how you can use a lack or presence of positive feedback in a +1 as any sort of indication on the quality of that +1. Unless you start asking reviewers to précis the change in their own words to show that they understood it I don't really see how additional positive comments help in most cases. Perhaps if you have some specific examples of this it would help to clarify Phil ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns
On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 7:21 PM, Day, Phil philip@hp.com wrote: Leaving a mark. === You review a change and see that it is mostly fine, but you feel that since you did so much work reviewing it, you should at least find *something* wrong. So you find some nitpick and -1 the change just so that they know you reviewed it. This is quite obvious. Just don't do it. It's OK to spend an hour reviewing something, and then leaving no comments on it, because it's simply fine, or because we had to means to test someting (see the first pattern). Another one that comes into this category is adding a -1 which just says I agree with the other -1's in here. If you have some additional perspective and can expand on it then that's fine - otherwise it adds very little and is just review count chasing. It's an unfortunate consequence of counting and publishing review stats that having such a measure will inevitable also drive behavour. I agree that having no comment with a +1 is OK. If I think the code looks good I'll +1 it. If I think the code could be better I'll -1 it and leave comments. I don't think that leaving a -1 with a 'what they said' comment is a bad thing. As the developer writing the patch it's helpful to know there is a consensus and it's not just one person requesting a change. -- David blog: http://www.traceback.org twitter: http://twitter.com/dstanek www: http://dstanek.com ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns
On Thu, 2013-11-07 at 00:21 +, Day, Phil wrote: Leaving a mark. === You review a change and see that it is mostly fine, but you feel that since you did so much work reviewing it, you should at least find *something* wrong. So you find some nitpick and -1 the change just so that they know you reviewed it. This is quite obvious. Just don't do it. It's OK to spend an hour reviewing something, and then leaving no comments on it, because it's simply fine, or because we had to means to test someting (see the first pattern). Another one that comes into this category is adding a -1 which just says I agree with the other -1's in here. If you have some additional perspective and can expand on it then that's fine - otherwise it adds very little and is just review count chasing. It's an unfortunate consequence of counting and publishing review stats that having such a measure will inevitable also drive behavour. Perhaps a source of the problem is early voting. Feeling pressure to add a +/-1 (or even 2) without fully asking what's going on in the code leads to premature adjudication. For instance, I have to do a lot of reviews in SCSI; I'm a subject matter expert, so I do recognise some bad coding patterns and ask for them to be changed unconditionally, but a lot of the time I don't necessarily understand why the code was done in the way it was, so I ask. Before I get the answer I'm not really qualified to judge the merits. James ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Bad review patterns
On Thu, Nov 07, 2013 at 12:21:38AM +, Day, Phil wrote: Leaving a mark. === You review a change and see that it is mostly fine, but you feel that since you did so much work reviewing it, you should at least find *something* wrong. So you find some nitpick and -1 the change just so that they know you reviewed it. This is quite obvious. Just don't do it. It's OK to spend an hour reviewing something, and then leaving no comments on it, because it's simply fine, or because we had to means to test someting (see the first pattern). Another one that comes into this category is adding a -1 which just says I agree with the other -1's in here. If you have some additional perspective and can expand on it then that's fine - otherwise it adds very little and is just review count chasing. I don't think that it is valueless as you describe. If I multiple people add '-1' with a same comments as name, then as a core reviewer I will consider that initial -1 to be a much stronger nack, than if only one person had added the -1. So I welcome people adding I agree with blah to any review. It's an unfortunate consequence of counting and publishing review stats that having such a measure will inevitable also drive behavour. IMHO what this shows is not people trying to game the stats, but rather the inadequacy of gerrit. We don't have any way to distinguish a -1 minor nice to have nitpick from a -1 serious code issue that is a must-fix. Adding a -2 is really too heavyweight because it is sticky, and implies do not ever merge this. It would be nice to be able to use '-2' for serious must-fix issue without it being sticky, and have a separate way for core reviewers to put an review into a block from being merged indefinitely state - perhaps a new state would be more useful eg a Blocked state, to add to New, Open, Merged, Abadoned. Daniel -- |: http://berrange.com -o-http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :| |: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org :| |: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :| |: http://entangle-photo.org -o- http://live.gnome.org/gtk-vnc :| ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev