On 10/10/2013 08:43 PM, Tim Smith wrote:
<snip>
Again, I don't have any vested interest in this discussion, except that
I believe the concept of "reviewer karma" to be counter to both software
quality and openness. In this particular case it would seem that the
simplest solution to this problem would be to give one of the hyper-v
team members core reviewer status, but perhaps there are consequences to
that that elude me.
There are very deep consequences to that. The core team model, where you
have 15 - 20 reviewers, but it only takes 2 to land code, only works
when the core teams share a culture. This means they know, or are
willing to learn, code outside their comfort zone. Will they catch all
the bugs in that? nope. But code blindness hits everyone, and there are
real implications for the overall quality and maintainability of a
project as complicated as Nova if everyone only stays in their
comfortable corner.
Also, from my experience in Nova, code contributions written by people
that aren't regularly reviewing outside of their corner of the world are
demonstrably lower quality than those who are. Reviewing code outside
your specific area is also educational, gets you familiar with norms and
idioms beyond what simple style checking handles, and makes you a better
developer.
We need to all be caring about the whole. That culture is what makes
OpenStack long term sustainable, and there is a reason that it is
behavior that's rewarded with more folks looking at your proposed
patches. When people only care about their corner world, and don't put
in hours on keeping things whole, they balkanize and fragment.
Review bandwidth, and people working on core issues, are our most
constrained resources. If teams feel they don't need to contribute
there, because it doesn't directly affect their code, we end up with
this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
So it's really crazy to call OpenStack less open by having a culture
that encourages people to actually work and help on the common parts.
It's good for the project, as it keeps us whole; it's good for everyone
working on the project, because they learn about more parts of
OpenStack, and how their part fits in with the overall system; and it
makes everyone better developers from learning from each other, on both
sides of the review line.
-Sean
--
Sean Dague
http://dague.net
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