Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Recruitment (Reviewers, Testers, Maintainers, Hobbyists)

[Dmitry Torokhov <dmitry.torokhov@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jul 09, 2015 at 12:39:51PM -0700, Darren Hart wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 08, 2015 at 02:53:15PM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> > On Wed, 08 Jul 2015 09:00:32 +0100
> > jic23@jic23.retrosnub.co.uk wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > > > We can alter that somewhat.  We used to run a Maintainers lottery for
> > > > the kernel summit ... we could instead offer places based on the number
> > > > of Reviewed-by: tags ... we have all the machinery to calculate that.  I
> > > > know an invitation to the kernel summit isn't a huge incentive, but it's
> > > > a useful one.
> > > 
> > > Sounds like a good idea to me, though it would only effect a tiny
> > > percentage of our reviewers.  I suppose publishing a short list of the top 
> > > n% of reviewers from which the lottery runs might give some
> > > recognition. 
> > > 
> > 
> > I personally don't trust a Reviewed-by tag much, as I sometimes see
> > them appear without any comments.
> > 
> > I was thinking of writing a perl script that would read my LKML archive
> > and somewhat intelligently looking at people who replied to patches,
> > that also has snippets of the patch in the reply, and counting them. I
> > think that would be a more accurate use of real reviewers than just the
> > Reviewed-by tag.
> 
> Agreed. Unless there is commentary accompanying the review, it doesn't add a
> lot.

No, that is not always true. If I see a naked "reviewed-by" from a
person who's been working on the subsystem quite a bit and shown a good
judgement it is enough for me. I do not need them to find something to
nitpick over so that there is "meat" to the review.

> While the nod of approval builds incremental confidence, the true measure
> of a review is a resulting change to the patch for the better. Of course, a good
> review takes the same amount of time regardless of if a change is required.

Thanks.

-- 
Dmitry