launchpad-reviewers team mailing list archive

[Brad Crittenden <bac@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Oct 19, 2010, at 02:15 , Robert Collins wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 5:42 AM, Henning Eggers
> 
> 
>> Please talk to Brad about both issues and see what he says.
> 
> I'm not sure why Brad specifically - the review team was always a
> democracy ever since it was formulated : we really want broad input,
> still we can start with Brad... Brad, what do you think?

The review team is, of course, a democracy.  I think Henning was probably just looking for a sanity check before involving the entire team.

As Rob indicated, the last few AsiaPac reviewers meetings have spent considerable time talking about lots of wide-ranging topics regarding reviews.  Some of those ideas have been written up now in a subsequent email Rob sent proposing the optional review experiment.

A discussion of eliminating tech debt was brought up by Curtis recently in the AmEu meeting ("don't add to canonical.launchpad as we're trying to get rid of it") and was uncontroversial.  We all agree tech debt is a burden for many reasons and in a perfect world we would make it go away.  Curtis proposed one approach and most people thought it was reasonable.  Robert has a different view, as expressed here, and in the AsiaPac meetings.

The topic comes up in the reviewers meeting because a) it is the only meeting where we all get together regularly, ignoring the fact we are forced to do it regionally with a single conduit (me), and b) the review is the last chance for a peer to catch the fact you may be contributing to tech debt or simply not cleaning it up.

The "you touch it, you fix it" mode of working is certainly not fair but it does cut across the board if we all agree to the idea.  I have no qualms as a reviewer saying "I know you didn't create this problem but while you're there would you spend a few minutes to clean it up?"  Most people are happy to oblige, not because I am wielding enormous reviewer power, but because we all agree we want to get rid of warts.

As to the fear that people will be unwilling to wander into the dark corners of the code base for fear they will be accountable for cleaning it all up, I'm not convinced that will be the way most of us will work.  Our enforcement of cleaning up things you touch is not heavy handed.  Henning asked that you have a follow-on branch but did not demand it as a condition of approval.  It is simply our agreement that we'll all share, more or less, in the less interesting chore of cleaning up after ourselves.

Robert I think your views expressed here are bigger than the issue at hand and represent an idea that our development process, not just our review process, is fundamentally flawed.  I think you need to find the appropriate forum to make suggestions and solicit input from everyone.
-- 
https://code.launchpad.net/~lifeless/launchpad/uniqueconfig/+merge/38689
Your team Launchpad code reviewers is requested to review the proposed merge of lp:~lifeless/launchpad/uniqueconfig into lp:launchpad/devel.