FWIW, I am not taking this question personally (I don't really claim
that I could become any kind of reviewer; I believe in general that
reviewing abilities should be evaluated by others.). I just think the
set of reviewers should significantly grow.
Andrew Haley wrote:
My feeling is on the contrary that the set of people having a real
knowledge of gcc (or at least of substantial parts of it [*]) is much
bigger than the set of reviewers allowed to say OK.
I am not at the summit. So I don't know if my perception "there are not
enough reviewers" [0] is shared by others or not. I suppose it is agreed
(that the set of reviewers should be increased [1]) If not, ignore the
rest. I really don't know if other people believe (as I do) that the set
of reviewers should significantly increase.
My perception is that many reviewers have too much reviews [2] in their
queue, and that these tasks might overwhelm or bore them. But since I am
not a reviewer, I cannot reliably understand what it is to be one. For
instance, my feeling is that Diego Novillo -whom I know, and I admire a
lot- (and some other GCC gurus) is almost exhausted by his pending
review queue.
That's certainly true, but there's a big difference between having real
knowledge of gcc and having enough real knowledge to approve a patch.
What might perhaps be discussed at the summit is possibly this (perhaps
too strong) requirement on the reviewer's level. If there are too few
reviewers, and if making a big lot of reviews is boring (or just too
demanding or too tiring) to them, then we might consider lowering the
threshold to become a reviewer (e.g. dispatch review abilities to more
people, or perhaps define some fine grain policy on future reviewers; I
could imagine that some people could review just a few GCC source files).
It is quite possibly the case that some maintainers should be "promoted".
But it isn't sufficient to have a blanket policy of "let's have more
reviewers".
But we first should agree on the wish than an increase of the set of
reviewers is desirable.
We need something more like "I think Fred Bloggs knows gcc
well enough to approve patches to reload" or "I am Fred Bloggs and I
know gcc well enough to approve patches to reload."
I am not sure to parse correctly this sentence. Sorry, English is a
foreign language to me. Is "reload" some functionality (PCH?) you refer
inside GCC, or is it the task of making reviews on patches submitted on
gcc-patches@ ? I was just thinking about stuff like "Fred Bloggs knows
enough to approve patches submitted on gcc-patches@ to files gcc/ggc*.[ch]"
And it could happen that the plugin infrastructure might in the future
move some code out of GCC core (and into plugins). In that future
situation, the set of reviewers might not need to increase.
Regards.
Note 0: for me a reviewer is any person admitted to say ok to some (even
very few) patches.
Note 1: My intuition is that the number of reviewers should be
proportional (at least; and one could believe to O(n log n) where n is
the size of GCC) to the GCC source size. I am not sure (& I don't know
if) it has increased by 30% in 3 years, as did the source code!
Note 2: I have no idea if the patch-to-be-reviewed queue of each
reviewer has increased since 2 years ago! I intuitively feel it did
increase a lot, i.e. reviewers have much more pressure on them. Maybe I
am wrong!
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Basile STARYNKEVITCH http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/
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