Re: A registry for distributed sources and binaries

[Andy Wingo <wingo@igalia.com>]

On Sun 24 Jul 2016 15:58, Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr> writes:

> A problem, as mentioned in another reply, is the lack of people doing code
> review, which is not a very rewarding task. That can be changed by everyone
> of us :-)

Could we just focus on this problem perhaps?

One of the issues is that there's no clear reviewer -- anyone just
pitches in.  We could try to have a culture of asking for particular
reviewers, perhaps via the IRC channel.  If you build up a relationship
with a particular reviewer then they can be your default reviewer, more
or less.  You put them in the Cc of your mails to the list.  This
approach has worked well in some other projects I have been involved in.

Another is to get Guix to suggest a reviewer.  For example if you modify
a package, Guix could look at the git history of that file in those
lines and see who changed it recently, and suggest a person to Cc.

I think Pjotr's example of Elixir was perhaps a bad one.  Languages are
tricky because they are not leaf nodes in the tree.   It's natural for a
Guix maintainer to have an opinion on how a language should be
integrated into Guix, even if they are not an expert.

A fully distributed system sounds nice but it has costs too.  In my mind
for a project of Guix's target size the best situation would be having
around 100 committers or so who have internalized the coding style and
patterns of Guix so that they can work more or less directly on the
parts they feel comfortable with, posting patches to the list as
necessary for feedback.  An incoming patch would be assigned to one of
those people based on automatic tooling.  In that way Guix can scale to
the next step while remaining a consistent, hackable project.

Andy