Re: Incentives for review

[Efraim Flashner <efraim@flashner.co.il>]

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On Thu, Oct 21, 2021 at 10:51:07AM -0700, Vagrant Cascadian wrote:
> 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

There is cbaines' guix-patches service (and other things), where you can
add the git remote https://git.guix-patches.cbaines.net/git/guix-patches
and then cherry-pick commits from there to the necessary branch. I
haven't used it much though.

-- 
Efraim Flashner   <efraim@flashner.co.il>   רנשלפ םירפא
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