Two perspectives on the maintainer relationship

Posted Mar 22, 2018 5:11 UTC (Thu) by hifi (guest, #109741)
Parent article: Two perspectives on the maintainer relationship

As someone who has been on both sides in smaller scale what I think contributors *really* want is just an ack that their patch/PR has been seen so they know they weren't forgotten, even if a full review takes a week or more. On a mailing list this would require sending a brief "will review later" kind of response.

Two perspectives on the maintainer relationship

Posted Mar 22, 2018 13:12 UTC (Thu) by pm215 (subscriber, #98099) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, I think there's a lot to be said for a quick first response. Sage Sharp's proposal of 'three phase' code review (http://sage.thesharps.us/2014/09/01/the-gentle-art-of-pat...) has this as one of its effects. (I really like the idea of 3-phase review but I've struggled with actually doing it in practice.)

One awkward dilemma with the quick-ack or quick-review is that I don't want to be doing all the code review for things I maintain, so sometimes I end up deliberately not replying to patches in the hope that somebody else will do the review...

I also find that the traditional "patches on a mailing list" approach makes it harder to track patches that need some kind of initial response or which have fallen through the cracks and not got any response at all -- does anybody have good tooling for that sort of thing?

Two perspectives on the maintainer relationship

Posted Mar 23, 2018 6:31 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> I also find that the traditional "patches on a mailing list" approach makes it harder to track patches that need some kind of initial response or which have fallen through the cracks and not got any response at all -- does anybody have good tooling for that sort of thing?

Like... any code review tool? https://lwn.net/Articles/702177/