Merging the Contact List and using reviewboard

[George Goldberg]

2011/3/23 David Edmundson <david at davidedmundson.co.uk>:
> This conversation came up in IRC and I wanted to bring it to the mailing
> list:
> - I want to merge Martin's contact list into the main repository.
>  -Martin is worried that if he has to start going through reviewboard for
> patches it's really going to slow down development.
> I can see where he's coming from, when I see one line patches on reviewboard
> it wastes my time going through sorting them out, and it does slow things
> down. Especially when everyone hacking is doing this just in the few moments
> of their freetime.
> On the other hand I have fixed a lot of code in reviewboard before it's
> merged, and had a lot of my mistakes spotted too.
> Personally I just want his stuff merged, and I'm happy to leave the choice
> of whether to enforce reviewboard or not to the discretion of the component
> leader.

I have no strong feelings on using reviewboard or not, but I'd
encourage people to use it for any patches that are more than just a
couple of lines. However, the thing I would really not want to see is
code being merged without review. So, if you have a quick change, ping
someone on IRC and get them to just check your branch. It is very
clear from the stuff on reviewboard so far (as well as experience
upstream in Telepathy) that unreviewed code == bad code. No matter how
well you think you know a code base, review is still beneficial
because other people may spot things you missed, or spot things that
aren't clear (to others, even if you personally find it very clear).
This is very important in a project with so many different developers
working on it.

If anyone is worried about how to make this work without slowing down
development too much, I'd encourage you to talk to the upstream
Telepathy developers in our channel (e.g. andrunko, oggis etc) who can
explain how Telepathy handles code review - it really works well for
them, so I think it can work well for us too.

--
George