Re: [dpdk-dev] expectations on maintainer's review

[Thomas Monjalon <thomas.monjalon@6wind.com>]

I've changed the title for this discussion.

2016-03-09 11:01, Bruce Richardson:
[snip comments about minor issue in release notes]

> Your question, though, does bring up the issue of scope and reviews again. I, as
> committer, spend a lot of time tweaking commit messages, sanity checking
> patches for compilation errors under various settings, and running checkpatch
> etc. before applying them. However, IMHO it is up to the maintainers of the
> various subsystems to enforce proper documentation in the patches submitted.
> The maintainers are the primary gatekeepers here, and I, for one, don't want to
> end up having to review all patches in detail before I apply them - otherwise
> we'll be limited to a very small number of driver patches per release :)

Yes that's a problem.

> In this case, if the submitter of the patch and the maintainer of the driver in
> question are happy with the documentation, then who am I to go querying that. :-)
> 
> Having committers do full review on apply will only have two possible effects:
> 1. make the maintainers less conscientious about their job, since they know the
>   committers will catch any real bugs or issues on apply

Yes we need maintainers to be conscientious on every parts of the patches.
One problem about the release notes and doc, is that not a lot of maintainers
have the "english skills".
Note that it would be easier if we would allow to write in Irish, Chinese or
French languages ;)
Unfortunately we took the constraints of writing in C and English.

> 2. cause a lot of problems for submitters as they see a lot of issues being
>   flagged at the last minute by committers, when they thought their patch was
>   safely acked and ready for commit for some time.
> 
> We certainly see lots of the second issue occurring right now, I believe - [I'm
> obvously not going to comment on the former :-)]
> 
> I'd be very much in favour of having a rule that once a patch is acked by a
> maintainer, then it must be applied. We may suffer a bit from slightly lower
> quality patches getting applied, but the speed of applying patches should
> increase, and the patch contents can always be fixed by subsequent patches later.
> [Unlike commit message which can't be fixed later without rewriting git history]
> In this case, I feel that phrase "the perfect is the enemy of the good" applies.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good

Yes but I don't think saying we are OK to decrease the quality is a good message.
The reality is that people never rework what was been committed.
That's why we must be very careful on API and documentation.
About the release notes, decreasing its quality mean we don't care wether it is
read and understood. So maybe we can shrink it to less details and have only a
title with a git/author reference.

> Just my 2c on this. I'm sure you have a different view, Thomas, so it's probably
> a discussion worth having.

Thanks for bringing the discussion.