On 02Nov2018 0933, Victor Stinner wrote:
Mentoring is an investment in the long term. Is it better to pay
someone to review and merge PRs?
Reviewing PRs is also a way to help and train contributors. It's not
very different from mentoring, depending on your definition of
mentoring :-)
The problem here is that most of the reviews require either specialised
knowledge of the area being changed (essentially the ability to predict
the flow-on impact of any change), or a strong decision that the change
is good. This severely limits the people who can approve most PRs.
Every time I start going through the list of PRs, I find that I'm
obviously not the right person to approve the change, or that I should
not be unilaterally approving the change (without discussing it on
python-dev). Which means that you can't pay me to review most PRs,
because I simply can't do it :) So who do we get to review them?
Without a stated direction/vision for CPython, it's very hard for any
individual developer to make unilateral decisions on many PRs. And since
there are many major areas, each with their own "team" or "expert", we
really need those maintainers to be reviewing PRs in their areas, and
also feeling empowered and supported to make leadership-like decisions
for their areas.
Mentoring is certainly the solution to the latter, provided the current
experts are mentoring new experts in their area, and landing a
governance model that helps us decide what sorts of other changes are
good for Python solves the former. Simply paying "someone" doesn't help.
Cheers,
Steve
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