[Chicago] I'm interested in reviewboard

[Kumar McMillan]

On 6/7/07, sheila miguez <shekay at pobox.com> wrote:
> I know I don't have a good record of showing up to meetings
> lately--and you guys have consistently good meetings, so I am annoyed
> about not showing up.
>
> nevertheless! Is anyone here involved in
> http://code.google.com/p/reviewboard/ ? It uses django. It's on topic.

thanks for posting this!  I've been on the hunt for a good code review
tool for our team to use.  I'm going to install this and try it out.

All I could find (open source) last time I looked was Codestriker
(http://codestriker.sourceforge.net/).  It took me forever to install
but only because I forgot how to do cgi in apache2, lots of head
scratching.  I have an aversion to anything perl but I tried it out
and it's actually pretty nice.  I only tried it with subversion and
here is what I noticed:

It sort of wants you to have each code-to-be-reviewed checked into a
work branch which is great but some of our smaller teams aren't so
dlligent about that.  You get a pretty useful view of the entire diff
(you can also upload a diff).  the coolest part is that when you want
to make a note on a specific segment of code you can just click on the
line number in the diff.  Then in the "issues" screen you can see a
snapshot of the code or link to the diff, or whatever.

In conclusion it seems passable for what we need (and beats the email
review) but still leaves a lot to be desired.  Now ... I'll need to
see what this reviewboard can offer :)

-Kumar

>
> I just learned about this from someone at work. He said I might be
> interested (I've posted long rambling posts about tools I'd like to
> have to facilitate code review -- I know that is probably the most
> unsexy underwhelming sounding thing ever, but I love it when something
> fills a painpoint gap

yes, this is a very much needed gap to be filled.

Rumor has it that the BDFL himself has been building a code review
tool for Google in [coincidentally] django called Mondrian:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Google/?p=407

who knows if that will ever be released open source but it might.

This also begs the rhetorical question: who is the man who says "OK"
to code written at Google ;)



-Kumar