There are a lot of patches lately with a lot of reviewers on them, especially related to porting since a lot of people might need to be in the loop for some changes.
The problem is that there's no clear responsibility given in these reviews. If I'm the sole reviewer on a change, I know I have to do a good job. When there are three other people, I sometimes assume that somebody else must have looked carefully at some part of the review. I'm sure sometimes all the reviewers think this and the change isn't reviewed properly. In other cases, some reviewers say LGTM for a patch, while others are still expecting changes. The author can get confused as to the status of the review, and I also know some patches have been checked in lately where at least one reviewer expected further changes before checkin. At the same time, we want to encourage many people to participate in the review process and keep tabs on what's going on. I propose several changes to best practices: 1. When a patch author requests more than one reviewer, they should make clear in the review request email what they expect the responsibility of each reviewer to be. Example: agl: bitmap changes evanm: process hacks everybody else: FYI In this case, I might be on the review list because I've asked to be in the loop for multiprocess changes, but I wouldn't be the primary reviewer and the author and other reviewers wouldn't be expecting me to review all the diffs in detail. 2. If you get a review that includes many other people, and the author didn't do (1), please ask them what part you're responsible for if you don't want to review the whole thing in detail. 3. The author should wait for approval from everybody on the reviewer list before checking in. 4. People who are on a review without clear review responsibility should be super responsive and not hold up the review. The patch author should feel free to ping them mercilessly if they are. 5. If you're on "FYI" person on a review and you didn't actually review in detail (or at all), but don't have a problem with the patch, note this. You could say something like "rubber stamp" or "ACK" instead of "LGTM." This way the real reviewers know not to trust that you did their work for them, but the author of the patch knows they don't have to wait for further feedback from you. Hopefully we can still keep everybody in the loop but have clear ownership and detailed reviews. It might even speed up some patches since I can quickly ACK patches I don't care about, and the patch author knows they don't have to wait for feedback from me. Or do you think this has too much overhead? Comments? Brett --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Chromium Developers mailing list: chromium-dev@googlegroups.com View archives, change email options, or unsubscribe: http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---