[Python-Dev] We should be using a tool for code reviews

[Guido van Rossum]

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 11:47 AM, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 11:41, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
>> On Wed, 29 Sep 2010 11:32:19 -0700
>> Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
>>> I would like to recommend that the Python core developers start using
>>> a code review tool such as Rietveld or Reviewboard. I don't really
>>> care which tool we use (I'm sure there are plenty of pros and cons to
>>> each) but I do think we should get out of the stone age and start
>>> using a tool for the majority of our code reviews.
>>
>> He, several of us would like it too (although for short patches it
>> doesn't really make a difference), but what's missing is some kind of
>> Roundup integration. Something as trivial as a "start review" button in
>> front of every uploaded patch file would do the trick; it has been
>> suggested several times already, but what's needed is someone to write
>> the code :)
>
> The other option (as discussed on Buzz) is to add Rietveld's upload.py
> to Misc/

A problem with that is that we regularly make matching improvements to
upload.py and the server-side code it talks to. While we tend to be
conservative in these changes (because we don't control what version
of upload.py people use) it would be a pain to maintain backwards
compatibility with a version that was distributed in Misc/ two years
ago -- that's kind of outside our horizon.

Maybe the upload.py script distributed could just download the most
current version from codereview.appspot.com/static/upload.py -- that
URL is easy enough to keep stable.

> and tell people to use that to submit the patch. Then we
> simply say to the person submitting the patch, "upload it to Rietveld
> and paste in the link" or simply require it upfront to encourage
> people to do the upload in the first place. This would let usage to
> move forward until we get that "start review" button (wasn't Ezio
> looking into it?).

Yeah, but it would still not work if they are working in an unpacked
tarball -- upload.py requires that you have a VCS checkout of some
sort (though it supports SVN, Hg, Git and Bzr).

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)