[dmd-internals] To consume pull requests for trivial bugs

[Jason House]

On Aug 20, 2012, at 4:01 PM, Brad Roberts <braddr at puremagic.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 20 Aug 2012, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> 
>> On 8/20/12 2:31 PM, David Nadlinger wrote:
>>> On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 8:09 PM, Brad Roberts<braddr at puremagic.com>  wrote:
>>>> Sorry, but the fix to not enough people with front end experience doing
>>>> code reviews is not to not do code reviews.
>>> 
>>> Agreed, but I'd like to add that this is a general problem with DMD
>>> development (maintainability?) - even Walter regularly commits code
>>> which doesn't even pass the auto tester.
>> 
>> This issue is a symptom of a simple underlying problem: we don't have enough
>> contributors. Kenji tried to find a solution within the current constraints,
>> whereas Brad responded from an "enough reviewers" frame of reference.
>> 
>> I think we need to add more active committers to dmd.
>> 
>> 
>> Andrei
> 
> I wasn't suggesting anything other than 'less code revew' isn't a solution 
> that's in our best interest.
> 
> If you want my opinion, Walter shouldn't be writing code unless the review 
> queue is empty.  It's harsh, but it'd net us far better throughput of 
> fixes and keep the contributors contributing.  We loose contributors and 
> constrict their contribution rate by not allowing work to flow into the 
> tree.
> 
> With increased throughput and increased contributors, they'd be in a 
> better position to also review either others code, making the need for 
> Walter to be the reviewer lower.
> 
> Lastly, as part of the code review, Walter needs to stop running the 
> tests.  That's what the pull auto tester is for.  Look at the code, 
> comment where not ready, merge where ready.
> 
> Later,
> Brad

I'm not particularly familiar with Linux kernel development, but my understanding is that smaller commits are aggregated by select helpers, and then the larger changsets are merged by the BDFL.  Maybe something similar would work for DMD?