[webkit-dev] Why I'm reviewing patches outside my area (and why you should too)

[Alex Milowski]

On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 1:17 PM, David Hyatt <hyatt at apple.com> wrote:
>
> On Mar 9, 2010, at 1:45 PM, Adam Barth wrote:
>
>>
>>  (1) The patch needs to be reviewed by David Hyatt.   David Hyatt
>> appears to be a bottleneck in the project because he's an expert on a
>> number of components that no one else understands as well but he
>> doesn't spend as much time reviewing patches as Maciej or Darin.  I
>> think the best solution here is to have more folks gain expertise in
>> these areas.
>
> "Dave needs to review this" is used as an excuse by others to get out of doing reviews in my opinion. :)
>
> MathML is a great example of this.  I don't need to be the sole person reviewing MathML patches that don't affect core code.  If the MathML rendering code lands in the tree with some mistakes or issues that can be fixed later, it's really not a big deal.  Maybe I would have noticed something that another reviewer wouldn't have, but the mistakes will get caught eventually.

It is a great example of this.  While I've been very appreciative of
Dave Hyatt's review and help, it
has really been great to have others jump in a review my code.  At
this point, I've had more
iterations of reviews and patches and the code (and my understanding
of WebKit) has gotten
quite a bit better just because people decided to review the MathML
code rather than wait for
it to get to the top of Dave's stack!

-- 
--Alex Milowski
"The excellence of grammar as a guide is proportional to the paucity of the
inflexions, i.e. to the degree of analysis effected by the language
considered."

Bertrand Russell in a footnote of Principles of Mathematics