Re: Only 27% of reviewed-by tags are explicit, and much more

[Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com>]

On Thu, Jun 17, 2021 at 11:47 PM Felipe Contreras
<felipe.contreras@gmail.com> wrote:
> This prompted me to write a script [6] to programmatically find statistics
> about these trailers. Obviously it isn't perfect (as all software); it
> tries to avoid human fuzziness (like people pasting other patches with
> scissors [-- >8 --], or just straight put pasting the patch [^From: ]), but
> even so there are instances I manually had to skip [7].
>
> Here are the top 20 reviewers over the past 10 years with their
> corresponding explicit over total Reviewed-by count:
>    ...
>   5. Eric Sunshine: 14% (17/116)

Does your script check cover letters? Based upon a quick glance at it,
it doesn't seem to.

Although I've reviewed thousands of patches over the years, I almost
never give my Reviewed-by:; it is an exceedingly rare occurrence.
However, when I do give it, it's almost always in response to the
cover letter (saying "this entire series is reviewed by <me>"), not in
response to individual patches. I've seen other reviewers do so, as
well. So, if your script doesn't take cover letters into account, then
you might want to revise it to do so in order to get a more accurate
picture. In fact, if my memory is correct, some reviewers give their
Reviewed-by: to an entire series in response to one of the patches
rather than to the cover letter, so perhaps you can come up with a
heuristic to identify those cases too.