[webkit-dev] review queue crazy idea

[Eric Seidel]

Wow.  I really like this idea of helping contributors better
understand what's going wrong.

But, I think that even better would be to build a better front-end for
reviews.  Or a bot which knew how to suggest reviewers (based on
annotate information from lines changed).

I encourage you to write any sort of better review tool/bot, turn it
on, and see what happens.  That's kinda what we did with the EWS and
commit-queue.  Initial reactions (to both) were strongly negative, but
we fixed a bunch of stuff from initial feedback, and I (would like to)
believe we have two useful systems now.  I see the same pattern
happening for someone trying to build some better review tools.

-eric

On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 5:40 PM, Ojan Vafai <ojan at chromium.org> wrote:
> There are currently 38 (of 171 total) patches in the review queue where the
> bugs have not been modified in over 1 month old. I propose we have a bot
> that educates people about writing easy to review patches and auto-rejects
> any patches in bugs that haven't been touched in over a month. For people
> new-ish to the WebKit project, it is often confusing both degree of
> responsibility that lies with the contributor to make the patch easy to
> review and the need to get reviewers' attention for a given patch.
> This is just an initial proposal. I'm not wed to any of the details of how
> this would work. I do think that auto-rejecting old patches is valuable to
> the project as a whole. Having the review queue be so large makes
> it daunting for any reviewer to try and tackle it. On the other hand,
> knowing that patches will magically fall off the end of the queue might
> encourage reviewers to just ignore some patches.
> An alternative to auto-rejecting patches would be to send a nag email once a
> week to webkit-reviewers@ with the list of patches that are over a month
> old.
>
> Here are my initial thoughts on what a review bot would do.
> After a patch turns a week old, send the following email:
> Patch 12345 of bug 6789 is a week old. It may just be because no reviewer
> has found time to review it. But there may be steps you can take to help get
> your patch reviewed. See http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/CodeReview for a few
> suggestions.
> -WebKit review bot
> After the patch is three weeks old:
> Patch 12345 of bug 6789 is three weeks old. If it is still unreviewed in a
> week, it will automatically be rejected. It may just be because no reviewer
> has found time to review it. But there may be steps you can take to help get
> your patch reviewed. See http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/CodeReview for a few
> suggestions.
> -WebKit review bot
> After the patch is a month old:
> Patch 12345 of bug 6789 has been rejected because it is too old. This is
> likely because no webkit reviewer has been able to review it. If you would
> still like the patch reviewed, then please do the following:
>
> Make sure your patch still applies to tip of tree.
> Do as many of the suggestions at http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/CodeReview as
> possible.
> Upload your patch for review again.
>
> -Webkit Review Bot
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