Although we've seen bad bugs (and bad memory bugs in particular) come from coders of all levels of experience, I personally am not at all comfortable with the idea of inexperienced Firefox front-end coders having review power in a module we intend to ship in Firefox.
(I don't mean to beg the question of whether that's what's being proposed here; I understand that it is based only on what mconnor is saying.) It is really easy to screw up and leak memory in the front-end, and I would expect that experienced Firefox hackers will be better-equipped to notice this sort of thing during review than inexperienced hackers. I don't think "coordination" with front-end experts is sufficient here, and indeed I've seen situations where a special-ops team such as is proposed here has developed code in a project branch and then asked for a giant roll-up review from a front-end peer, essentially turning the review into a rubber-stamp. I may be missing something, but I don't think that prior experience with BrowserID -- which is entirely content JS, iiuc -- translates to expertise writing for the Firefox front-end. They are entirely different beasts. Ultimately, I think this needs to be explicitly signed off on by a group of existing Firefox peers or owners, with the understanding that they will be on the hook for any breakage. If one or more existing Firefox peers is willing to personally accept responsibility for this module, I'd be OK with this proposal. Do you think that's a fair burden to meet? -Justin On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 6:19 PM, Ben Adida <[email protected]> wrote: > On 1/29/13 3:16 PM, Mike Connor wrote: >> >> >> I'm more concerned with day to day code review/quality, if that helps >> clarify things. > > > I'm not sure how to allay these fears. When we did the BrowserID/Persona > module, we specifically worked closely with Justin Dolske and his team to > understand coding styles and idioms, and I think we ended up doing fairly > well. I expect we'll do the same here. > > > -Ben > _______________________________________________ > governance mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
