On 04/11/2012 01:00 PM, Jeffrey Altman wrote:
This week I have received private mail from several individuals which
are concerned about the rate of OpenAFS development. There were several
topics raised across the e-mails and I'm going to pick out themes and
try to address them in separate mails to this list and openafs-info as
appropriate.
The first theme is that it takes too long for patches to be accepted
into OpenAFS. As evidence of the overwhelming delays is the nearly 100
patchsets that are sitting in Gerrit for more than two weeks. Many of
which have been sitting there for nearly two years.
Many of these patchsets are ideas that were sent to Gerrit either so
they wouldn't be lost or so others could use them as a starting point.
Some of the patchsets are items that have been reviewed but which have
outstanding issues which were never addressed. But the vast majority of
the items sitting in Gerrit for an extended period of time are patches
that have simply not received sufficient reviews to decide what to do
with them.
The fact is that the number of active reviewers is exceedingly small.
Here are the statistics for the 4180 patches contributed to the 'master'
branch since Gerrit was deployed.
3178 Reviewed-by: Derrick Brashear
1355 Reviewed-by: Jeffrey Altman
217 Reviewed-by: Simon Wilkinson
155 Reviewed-by: Russ Allbery
110 Reviewed-by: Andrew Deason
68 Reviewed-by: Marc Dionne
51 Reviewed-by: Rod Widdowson
49 Reviewed-by: Asanka Herath
43 Reviewed-by: Alistair Ferguson
24 Reviewed-by: Peter Scott
21 Reviewed-by: Matt Benjamin
15 Reviewed-by: Tom Keiser
12 Reviewed-by: Dan Hyde
11 Reviewed-by: Michael Meffie
9 Reviewed-by: Chaz Chandler
6 Reviewed-by: Hartmut Reuter
6 Reviewed-by: Benjamin Kaduk
5 Reviewed-by: Stefan Kueng
5 Reviewed-by: Garrett Wollman
3 Reviewed-by: Jacob Thebault-Spieker
2 Reviewed-by: Thomas L. Kula
2 Reviewed-by: Steve Simmons
2 Reviewed-by: Phillip Moore
2 Reviewed-by: Mickey Lane
2 Reviewed-by: Jonathan A. Kollasch
2 Reviewed-by: Jeffrey Hutzelman
2 Reviewed-by: Claudio Bisegni
2 Reviewed-by: Adam Megacz
2 Reviewed-by: Ken Dreyer
1 Reviewed-by: sanket
1 Reviewed-by: Tharidu Fernando
1 Reviewed-by: Steven Jenkins
1 Reviewed-by: Stephan Wiesand
1 Reviewed-by: Rainer Toebbicke
1 Reviewed-by: Jason Edgecombe
1 Reviewed-by: Christof Hanke
1 Reviewed-by: Chaskiel Grundman
1 Reviewed-by: Chas Williams
1 Reviewed-by: Alexander Ivan Redinger
1 Reviewed-by: Alex Chernyakhovsky
All reviews are performed by volunteers. It is nobody's day job to
perform Gerrit reviews. Obviously Derrick, Russ and I as the
gatekeepers that review patches as part of the approval process have
performed the largest number of reviews. A special note of thanks to
Simon, Andrew, Marc and Rod for being at the top of the non-gatekeepers
list.
In the last year alone there have been 44 contributors whose work has
been committed to openafs master. Yet there are fewer than that number
of individuals who have reviewed someone else's work since Gerrit was
implemented.
No one is being paid to review code. Not even the gatekeepers. The
nearly 100 patchsets that are sitting in Gerrit represent approximately
2% of all of the patches that have been submitted. The role of the
gatekeepers in the review process is important but they should not be
the sole review mechanism for OpenAFS submissions.
OpenAFS needs a much more active reviewer community.
If we were to impose a requirement that every patchset must receive a
total vote of +4 or +5 before it could be submitted, would that help to
obtain reviews?
The floor is open for discussion.
Jeffrey Altman
Is there an agreed-upon criteria for review? If so, where are the
criteria? I ask this as I consider my "C" skill to be poorly developed.
What is the goal for patchset review? More eyeballs on fewer patches,
fewer eyeballs with more patches? In other words, where do we want to be
on the spectrum or quality vs. quantity?
Other ideas:
* giving more people rights to approve a patchset (more gatekeepers?)
* automatically approving a patchset after the voting threshold is met
(robo-gatekeeper?)
* different levels of votes with an increased voting threshold. (i.e.
gatekeepers =3 votes, active contributors=2 votes, everyone else=1 vote.
3 votes approves a patch?)
* maybe we should keep a regularly-updated scoreboard and award brownie
points for most active reviewers.
crazier ideas:
* are there other non-openafs communities that we could tap into? If
stackoverflow.com did code reviews, that would be awesome.
* could we tie in with some other shared reputation/reward system? (i.e.
earning stackoverflow credits, slashdot karma, bitcoins, 1 free support
incident from an openafs partner)
* rewards for marketing openafs to the outside world. This might draw in
fresh blood.
* frequent reviewers earn more votes on gerrit, with some type of
metamoderation to deter abuse.
* require a commiter to review X patches, from a different person, for
each patchset that he commits.(X could be 1-3 based on what the group
decides)
* each reviewer gets X votes per patch that may be used to vote for
feature prioritization.
Jason
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