On Fri, May 18, 2007 at 12:05:55PM -0400, Alvaro Herrera wrote: > there are no obvious, glaring mistakes could go a long way. (I have > this weird idea that I should not apply a patch unless someone else says > "hey, looks OK to me". Somehow, the mere lack of objections does not > increase my confidence.)
I have nothing to contribute on the suggestion, since I can neither offer review nor patches. But I can offer an analogy that will maybe strengthen your point, and might offer a hint of how to make the developer community bigger. In the IETF working groups I follow, most of the chairs have decided to impose some baseline level of group review for protocol documents. In dnsop, for instance, we have a rule that if at least five people do not review an Internet Draft and agree to its publication, it just won't get advanced as a working group document. The idea is that, if we can't get that small number of reviews, then either the working group either isn't interested in the feature or topic, or the draft is a bad idea as it stands. As a result, if you want to have the suasion to get people to review your own submissions, you also have to do the work of reviewing others'. But it also means that if you're new to an area, you can become better in that area by doing document review. Probably, your own reviews won't uncover big flaws that those more experienced with the protocol will find; but you'll be able to make some small contributions that will allow you help in getting the documents finished. Also, while you're at it, you'll be forced to read all the referenced documents, which help you learn about the protocol and therefore make you more valuable to the WG. Perhaps, then, new contributors to Postgres could also take on the task of reviewing some of the patches, not as a matter of being the _only_ reviewer -- the new code still needs review by those more experienced with the rest of the code -- but as a first-pass review that will help in a "more eyeballs" sort of way. This would also have the happy paedogogical effect that those newer reviewers would learn more of the code in each cycle. I think this is similar to a previous suggestion someone made about "mentored review", but it doesn't require formal mentoring for it to get started. A -- Andrew Sullivan | [EMAIL PROTECTED] Users never remark, "Wow, this software may be buggy and hard to use, but at least there is a lot of code underneath." --Damien Katz ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org