Re: Process for reviewing patches as someone without commit access

[Christopher Baines]

Felix Lechner <felix.lechner@lease-up.com> writes:

> On Wed, Sep 6, 2023 at 9:47 AM Christopher Baines <mail@cbaines.net> wrote:
>>
>> Maybe we can use debbugs tags for this?
>
> Instead of pushing people into reviews and then again making the same
> committers a bottleneck, I would offer some entry-level contributors
> commit rights but require that they obtain approval for some steps. It
> can be done on a trust basis.

It's an idea, although one I'd discount based on how many breaking
changes (including ones with wide impact like breaking guix pull) happen
with the current criteria for granting commit access.

I don't want to make reviewing changes more difficult, and I think
setting up more people with commit access and continuing the trend that
it's mostly people with commit access that review changes would increase
the difficulty, compared to what I'm proposing here, which is trying to
empower people who just do review whilst avoiding any of the complexity
of merging and pushing the changes without breaking things.

Now of course you could argue that it being easy to break things is a
problem, and maybe it is, but often it's not strictly someone breaking
something but simply a commit not being signed, or not being signed in a
way that guix accepts. Here I think pushing changes is complicated for
good reason.

> That way, you can train a new generation of committers while getting
> the work done.

In my opinion, I want to see review and committing things become more
separated, because the valuable thing is having good review. Committing
and pushing someone elses changes isn't adding much value to Guix in and
of itself, but good review of those changes does.

If we end up with a big backlog of changes that are reviewed and ready
to merge, then I'm all for training and helping more people do the
committing and pushing, but I have a suspicion that it's the review bit
that takes the time.

Thanks,

Chris

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