Re: Incentives for review

[Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@debian.org>]

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On 2021-10-19, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com> skribis:
>
>> On Tue, 19 Oct 2021 at 14:56, Ludovic Courtès <ludovic.courtes@inria.fr> wrote:

>> One question is “encouragement” for reviewing, somehow.  Asking for new
>> package additions to go via guix-patches is a call making kind of
>> equality between contributors.  As someone without commit access, I can
>> tell you that it is often demotivating to send a trivial addition, wait
>> forever, ping people (aside I know who I have to ping :-)).  Usually, it
>> means people are busy elsewhere, so I try to help to reduce the workload
>> by reviewing stuff or by doing bug triage.  However, in the same time, I
>> see committers push their own trivial additions.  It appears to me
>> “unfair”.
>
> I understand and sympathize (I also see us slipping off-topic :-)).
>
>> Why are committer’s trivial additions more “urgent” than mine?
>
> Yeah, I see what you mean.
>
> I would like to see us committers do more review work.  But I also view
> things from a different angle: everyone contributes in their own way,
> and each contribution is a gift.  We can insist on community
> expectations (reviewing other people’s work), but we should also welcome
> contributions as they come.

I must admit, I don't review patches unless they're in an area of
expertise (e.g. u-boot, arm-trusted-firmware, reproducible builds
tooling, etc.); I just don't have sufficient skill with guile to review
arbitrary packages in a meaningful way, other than the most trivial of
packages...

Before I was granted commit access, I *really* appreciated getting
review... but was also frustrated by how long it took to get a
contribution in; having limited time available for guix, spending that
energy checking if something I'd already "finished" was actually merged
was a bit demotivating.

I have added a small number of trivial packages without review; maybe I
shouldn't have... but it was also a bit of a sigh of relief once I could
push directly to no have to get caught up in the waiting game; I had
more time to actually contribute other improvements to guix.


> There’s a balance to be found between no formal commitment on behalf of
> committers, and a strict and codified commitment similar to what is
> required for participation in the distros list¹.

So yeah, it is a quite balancing act!


Would a workflow of pushing to a "wip-pending" branch in guix.git that
then gets merged and/or cherry-picked into master/staging/core-updates
help at all?

A cursory review could commit to "wip-pending", with the
plan/hope/expectation that it would get some other review and/or a
timeout before it gets merged.

I guess it would be hard to avoid having to constantly rebase with the
latest updates... "wip-pending" might just add more work to an already
needs-more-resources process...


live well,
  vagrant

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