On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 03:24:31PM -0400, Hugh Brock wrote:
I had an interesting conversation with a couple of folks this morning
along these lines. In fact, I'd like to take things a bit farther and
suggest that we could speed things up *a lot* if we removed the
requirement that each patch has to be applied and tested by someone
other than the author. It seems to me it's probably sufficient to ask
patch authors to test their own patches before posting them, and allow
reviewers to sign off after reading the code on-list. I think we could
*at least* leave this to the patch author's discretion -- if they
really want another pair of eyes on a new feature, great, but if
they're comfortable guaranteeing that the patch finishes a task
correctly and that all tests pass, an ACK based on reading the patch
should be sufficient.
I think I initially misread this. To be clear, what you are suggesting
is that developers would still send out a patch and wait for another
contributor to give it an ACK, but the reviewer could give it an ACK
without having to do end-to-end testing on it? (Or, if they were
confident, potentially without doing any testing?)
I think this is fine, if it's truly at the discretion of the reviewer.
There are times I've spent 20 minutes reviewing a patch that really
didn't need any sort of review.
I'm just a little fearful that this is a slippery slope into _always_
just skimming patches and giving them an ACK without testing, even when
they're involved patches that could break things.
Overall I think this is a good thing, subject to the above caveat,
though.
-- Matt