(x-post platform + governance + bmo, please followup-to governance)
Today I was asked for super-review. Although I've been around a while, I
am not a super-reviewer. I can't remember the last time before today
that I was asked (it's quite possibly: never). The person who asked me
was mostly just wanting me to do a second review, in addition to the
review the patch in question had already had.
I looked for our policy of super-review and list of current super
reviewers (
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/reviewers/ ).
It seems the list is woefully out of date (it lists gavin, shaver,
biesi, and a number of other people who I'm confident are wonderful but
either haven't used bugzilla for several years, or have only used it to
un-cc themselves from issues or similar non-super-review-y activity).
In public bugs > 1300000 (filed in the last 11 months; I can't get the
'field changed after' bugzilla advanced query to work right), there have
been 13 super-reviews. 9 in Core, 2 in NSS and 1 each in Android
Background Services and MailNews. (link: https://mzl.la/2w6Ttba )
From a quick browse of these bugs, as best I can tell the only reason
the superreview flag was used was to indicate "I want a second review
from this other person who I know knows this code well", and often it
was omitted on the checkin comment or included as if it were a normal
review (ie r=foo,bar rather than r=foo,sr=bar), even where the people
concerned *are* on the superreview list (which, equally often, they're not).
I note here that you can easily request multiple reviews (or any other
flag) in bugzilla or mozreview by simply comma-separating the reviewers
(or their uniquely-matching aliases) in the single textbox for that flag
i.e. ":mary,:john" will request review from those 2 people.
For something that happens on the order of 100 times less often than
"normal" review requests, I don't think the extra field, documentation
etc. is worth the confusion.
I therefore propose 2 things:
1) we remove the super-review flag from Core/Firefox/Toolkit, or perhaps
everything except maybe NSS (on the assumption it is actively used there).
2) we either remove or in some obvious way mark the above-linked
super-review document as out of date / archived / historical, and remove
any links such as may exist from documentation/mdn that point to that page.
If there is a vibrant culture of super-review that matches up to the
afore-linked document that I am completely unaware of because I move in
the 'wrong' circles, and that somehow wasn't captured in my bugzilla
query, please bring that up. If that were the case, please can we update
the document to list the Right People, and hide the super-review field
in products and components where it isn't routinely used (which I am
reasonably confident would still include the Firefox and Toolkit
products) to avoid confusion.
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