Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Keeping reviews meaningful

[Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org>]

Hi Wolfram,

On Sat, Jul 6, 2019 at 4:32 PM Wolfram Sang <wsa@the-dreams.de> wrote:
> In the parts of the Kernel I work with, reviews are usually given by a plain
> tag. I think this is not enough to keep a good code quality, so I'll start with
> my theses first:
>
> 1) we need a better distinction between Acked-by: and Reviewed-by: and encourage
>    stricter use of that

Before we had "Reviewed-by", "Acked-by" meant "looks OK to me".
Then we got "Reviewed-by" for more thorough reviews.

> 2) Reviewed-by should have a description of the review done (and the review not
>    done)
>
> 3) trivial patches should rather get Acked-by

These days when given by a maintainer, "Acked-by" means that the
maintainer is happy for the patch going in through another subsystem.

> Some more words about each item:

> 2) A short paragraph will usually do. Of course, trust helps a lot, but it
> doesn't solve everything. Trusted people can be in a hurry, too, etc. And for
> people I don't know, the plain tag doesn't tell me much. Examples for short
> descriptions: "I can't say much about the media part, but the I2C part is
> proper" or "I also checked the documentation and I think this is a good
> approach to overcome the issue" or "All my concerns in the preceding
> discussions have been addressed"

Definitely good to have, but hard to enforce, without making the process
heavier.

I have a fifth thesis: many people (incl. guilty me) browse quickly
through many patches flying by on mailing lists, but don't always go to
the effort of replying if they don't see something wrong immediately.
This means we don't catch a share of the reviews happening.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                        Geert

-- 
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                -- Linus Torvalds