On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 10:35 AM, Neil Kandalgaonkar<neilk(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:> Are we all in deadlock or something? Are the users who can push waiting> from some proposals/work from the rest of the community?We had a hallway conversation about this just now (Neil, Trevor, Brionand I, and then just Brion and I), which I think was pretty useful.Here's where we went with it:1. We rehashed the pre-commit review proposal that Neil suggested afew months ago, and agreed that pre-commit would be helpful in keepingthe backlog down2. Given our current tools/process, we agreed that insisting onpre-commit review would be a pain in the butt.3. Brion and I further discussed review process, trying to come upwith a system that give us the benefits of pre-commit review, withoutactually switching to pre-commit reviewHere's where things I think got interesting. Brion pointed out thatin ye olden days, he was much more aggressive about reverting thingshe didn't understand. I pointed out that, as we broaden the pool ofcommitters, "I don't understand"-based reversions lead to a lot ofugliness, since very few people claim to have a broad understanding ofthe system and therefore an expectation of understanding every change. Most reviewers, faced with a commit they don't understand, will leaveit for others to comment on. There's been a lot of unnecessary dramaand churn over reversions because of misunderstandings about what areversion means.So, there's a number of possible solutions to this problem. These areindependent suggestions, but any of these might help:1. We say that a commit has some fixed window (e.g. 72 hours) to getreviewed, or else it is subject to automatic reversion. This willmotivate committers to make sure they have a reviewer lined up, andmake it clear that, if their code gets reverted, it's nothingpersonal...it's just our process.2. We encourage committers to identify who will be reviewing theircode as part of their commit comment. That way, we have an identifiedperson who has license to revert if they don't understand the code.I coulda swore there are other ideas that came out of thatconversation, but alas, I wasn't taking notes. Anyway, I'm surethey'll come up in this thread.Rob