[webkit-dev] webkit team wiki page

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On Jan 24, 2010, at 7:42 PM, David Kilzer wrote:

> On Sun, January 24, 2010 at 7:09:26 PM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> 
>> I think deleting the areas of knowledge is a regrettable loss of information. I 
>> think it's helpful to give people at least a few starting points for their 
>> questions, because not everyone is going to be comfortable firing random 
>> questions at IRC, and svn blame i not a very useful tool if you don't know the 
>> code very well yet. Further, even for experienced contributors, I think this 
>> information could be useful as a guide to whom you might hassle to review your 
>> patch, if it doesn't get reviewed right away. I mean, I've been involved in the 
>> project for a pretty long time, and I can't honestly say I know the right people 
>> to ask for advice on every possible topic in the code, without a reference.
> 
> 
> One possible alternative would be to update the bugs.webkit.org Component page with a list of reviewers by component:
> 
> <https://bugs.webkit.org/describecomponents.cgi?product=WebKit>

I don't think we're looking to list just reviewers but rather "people who know about this topic" and therefore might be good to ask about the topic. Often you want to know this before you even start working on a patch. Some types of expert advice are cross-cutting across components as well. For example, if you want to find a person who can help you with performance work, or analyze the security impact of a feature, those kinds of things are not likely to be components.

And finally, the only fields we have for components are the description, default assignee and default Cc list. I am not sure any of these is appropriate as a way to indicate people who know most about the topic, given our process.

> 
> It puts the information closer to where it's needed.  The only down sides are that it's not necessarily easy to find (click on the link of the "Component:" label on any bug page) and it requires special access to bugs.webkit.org to edit the component descriptions.

My suggestion would be to put the info back on the wiki page until we find a better place for it.

Regards,
Maciej