[Python-Dev] Appeal for reviews

[R. David Murray]

On Mon, 14 Apr 2014 08:18:13 -0400, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 14 Apr 2014 01:56, "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
> >
> > martin at v.loewis.de writes:
> >
> >  > For gaining commit access, it's really more important that the patch
> >  > is factually finished, than that it's author believes it to. If people
> >  > get it right the first time often enough, they get commit access.
> >
> > Yes, that's what I had in mind, but I guess I explained it poorly.
> 
> We should capture this discussion clearly in the dev guide. Even if we
> switch to a core reviewer model at some point (as I propose in PEP 462),
> the criteria for core reviewer status will match those for core commiter
> status.
> 
> There are actually a few things I'm personally looking for:
> 
> * good judgement on when a patch is "finished enough" to merge
> * good judgement on whether a change is a new feature or a bug fix
> * good judgement whether a new feature is worth the additional cognitive
> burden
> * good ability to assess backwards compatibility risks
> * sufficient humility to answer "I don't know" to the above questions when
> appropriate and ask the relevant domain experts, their sponsoring mentor,
> the core-mentorship list or python-dev at large for advice on what to do

When considering who we give commit access to, I think we would be
well served to start giving more weight to the quality of the code
reviews that someone does.  Producing good patches is important,
but even without moving the infrastructure to Nick's "core reviewer"
model, doing those reviews is an important part of what committers
do, and it is a different (although related) skill to that of
writing good patches.

Or to put it another way, I'd like to encourage contributors who
want to get commit access to focus just as much on doing good reviews as
they do on writing new patches.  Currently the focus is all on
getting patches accepted.

--David