Xen devel - Apr 2013 - need more reviewers!

Hi all,
I would like to encourage the many contributors of the Xen project to do
more code reviews.

In fact not being a maintainer doesn''t mean that your code reviews are
useless, on the contrary!
Not only your reviews help the (overworked) maintainers doing theirs,
but also it is the fastest way to build up reputation, trust and
eventually become a maintainer yourself.


I would encourage you to make use of the Reviewed-by tag instead of the
Acked-by that it is what the maintainers use to say "this patch should
go in".
From Linux''s Documentation/SubmittingPatches:


"""
	By offering my Reviewed-by: tag, I state that:

 	 (a) I have carried out a technical review of this patch to
	     evaluate its appropriateness and readiness for inclusion into
	     the mainline kernel.

	 (b) Any problems, concerns, or questions relating to the patch
	     have been communicated back to the submitter.  I am satisfied
	     with the submitter''s response to my comments.

	 (c) While there may be things that could be improved with this
	     submission, I believe that it is, at this time, (1) a
	     worthwhile modification to the kernel, and (2) free of known
	     issues which would argue against its inclusion.

	 (d) While I have reviewed the patch and believe it to be sound, I
	     do not (unless explicitly stated elsewhere) make any
	     warranties or guarantees that it will achieve its stated
	     purpose or function properly in any given situation.
"""


Some sub-projects need more reviewers than others, in particular I
would encourage contributors to review patches to:

tools/libxl
xen/arch/x86
xen/common
tools/blktap*


Happy reviewing everybody,

Stefano

On Thu, 2013-04-25 at 14:16 +0100, Stefano Stabellini
wrote:
> Hi all,
> I would like to encourage the many contributors of the Xen project to do
> more code reviews.
> 
> In fact not being a maintainer doesn''t mean that your code reviews
are
> useless, on the contrary!
> Not only your reviews help the (overworked) maintainers doing theirs,
> but also it is the fastest way to build up reputation, trust and
> eventually become a maintainer yourself.
As a maintainer I would just like to reiterate that reviews by anyone at
all are greatly appreciated and help reduce my burden. Obviously the
amount by which it reduces the burden (i.e. how much review I can avoid
doing myself) depends on the "reputation" of the reviewer in my mind,
but the way that reputation is built up is by reviewing stuff. I''m sure
other maintainers operate on similar principals.
> I would encourage you to make use of the Reviewed-by tag
Yes.

[...]
> Some sub-projects need more reviewers than others, in particular I
> would encourage contributors to review patches to:
> 
> tools/libxl
> xen/arch/x86
> xen/common
For this one I was wondering if a policy of Acks from all the arch
maintainers being sufficient for a common code change would work?

There are some obvious cases here which have been coming up a lot
recently, like x86 code becoming common so it can also be used ARM.

Ian.

>>> On 02.05.13 at 13:44, Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@citrix.com>
wrote:
> On Thu, 2013-04-25 at 14:16 +0100, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
>> Some sub-projects need more reviewers than others, in particular I
>> would encourage contributors to review patches to:
>> 
>> tools/libxl
>> xen/arch/x86
>> xen/common
> 
> For this one I was wondering if a policy of Acks from all the arch
> maintainers being sufficient for a common code change would work?
That''s a nice proposal, but could become less efficient if the
number of arch-es extends between the at most three we had
at our best times so far.

Jan