It seems to me that something probably ought to be done, because most of the analysis modules are so domain-specific that they often require expertise in that particular area in order to give a proper review beyond just code errors and/or style. This is often what happens, in PR hangouts I often hear “well, the code itself looks good, even though I have no idea what it does."

photon_simulator is an example of this (albeit an extreme one). I’ve contemplated spinning it off into a separate package, given that its size and complexity are both getting rather large, but given that we have more than a handful of users for it I feel that this would be too disruptive.

As an example of how to do “affiliated packages”, AstroPy has such a notion, but I always found the process by which a package achieves this status rather complicated. 

http://www.astropy.org/affiliated/

On Dec 30, 2015, at 5:25 PM, Matthew Turk <matthewturk@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all,

This is an interesting discussion ... and to be honest, I'm kind of
left wondering if maybe we should be encouraging more analysis modules
to be external packages.  I came into this thinking that we would want
to make analysis modules behave more like external packages that get
bundled, but I'm not sure that's the case after all.  Unfortunately,
we don't *have* a method for defining "affiliated" packages, and we
certainly don't have (or *want*) an update mechanism for external
packages that build on yt.  But this becomes something of a
self-reinforcing loop ... Maybe we should come up with something like
that, so that projects that build on yt can be "advertised" somehow in
the base package, or something.  I am not sure.

Anyway, the responses to this thread make me think perhaps we
shouldn't lower the review barrier after all -- going from 3 to 2 is
perhaps just window dressing, and maybe we should encourage the
analysis modules to have higher bus factors.

-Matt

On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 5:09 PM, Nathan Goldbaum <nathan12343@gmail.com> wrote:
I agree. If we can identify maintainers for analysis modules, I think only
one additional approval besides the maintainer is fine. If the maintainer
proposes the PR, they should try to get at least one person to look over it
in detail before it gets merged.

On Tuesday, December 29, 2015, Britton Smith <brittonsmith@gmail.com> wrote:

I agree that the number of approvals is less important than ensuring that
PRs come with appropriate tests and docs.  If the PR is a change to an
existing analysis module, we should just make sure the relevant devs are
identified and that they sign off on it.  If it's something brand new, I
think 2 or 3 people is probably still a good idea.

On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 4:44 PM, Matthew Turk <matthewturk@gmail.com>
wrote:

Ideally, with the barrier to acceptance reduced, the reviews that come
in may be deeper and more thoughtful ... and less along the lines of
"Can somebody just hit the approve button?"

On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 4:41 PM, John ZuHone <jzuhone@gmail.com> wrote:
+1 for lowering the barrier. At a minimum, tests should pass, and new
tests
should be encouraged if possible. Docs as well.

Not too worried about 1 or 2 approvals. We could try 2 at first to see
if
this helps things out.

On Dec 29, 2015, at 5:39 PM, Cameron Hummels <chummels@gmail.com>
wrote:

As long as the code being changed is local to an analysis module and
not
used by other parts of the main yt codebase, yes, I'm all for dropping
the 3
reviewer requirement to 2.  1 might be pushing it though.

On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 2:38 PM, Matthew Turk <matthewturk@gmail.com>
wrote:

That's precisely what I had in mind.

On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 4:36 PM, Nathan Goldbaum
<nathan12343@gmail.com>
wrote:
On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 4:29 PM, Matthew Turk
<matthewturk@gmail.com>
wrote:

[+-][01] on reducing review overhead for analysis modules?


Does this just mean reducing the number of PR reviewers before we
merge
pull
requests? I'd be ok with that, but just want to clarify what you
have in
mind.

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--
Cameron Hummels
NSF Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Astronomy
California Institute of Technology
http://chummels.org
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