[phobos] [D-Programming-Language/phobos] a15e68: Accidentally committed with a bunch of debugging c...

[Jonathan M Davis]

> On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 4:45 PM, Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg at gmx.com>wrote:
> > I'm a bit divided on it. Andrei and Lars were pushing for _all_ check-ins
> > to
> > be reviewed. Part of me thinks that that's overkill and yet there have
> > been times that other developers have caught stuff that I likely
> > wouldn't have even
> > with smaller changes.
> > 
> > It does seem like overkill to require a pull request for smaller changes,
> > particularly if they really don't look like they'd cause a problem, but
> > at the
> > same time, the extra eyes can be really valuable, even when you don't
> > expect
> > it.
> > 
> > The truly minor, non-code stuff - such as updating the changelog -
> > shouldn't
> > need a pull request, but at this point, I'm inclined to agree with Andrei
> > and
> > Lars that all (or at least very nearly all) code changes should go
> > through pull requests.
> 
> Actually, one of my big concerns with using pull requests is that I want
> near-instant feedback from the auto tester to make sure my stuff works on
> all platforms.  It's frustrating to have to wait an indeterminate amount of
> time for such feedback.

I definitely understand that, but if we do that, then code isn't getting 
reviewed. And the reviews on github have definitely been helping improve code. 
As far as code quality goes, pull requests are very much a good thing.

The flip-side, of course, is the delays. It's not uncommon for a pull request 
to sit there for a week or more (in fact, I believe that a pull request that 
gets pulled in in less than a week would be a rarity at this point). But 
unless we have more people who are regularly reviewing and commenting on pull 
requests, I don't know how to fix that.

Ideally, there would be a way to test your code on all platforms _before_ 
creating a pull request for it, but at the moment, short of setting up all of 
the systems yourself for yourself, there's no way to do that.

Still, on the whole, I think that the pull requests have had a positive 
influence on code quality, and I think that they're a good thing. The question 
is how we deal with and fix the problems that arise from them (particularly 
the delays), and whether _all_ code changes should go through pull requests. 
And as I said, I lean towards requiring that everything but the smallest of 
changes go through pull requests, but I agree that the current delays in that 
process are definitely problematic.

- Jonathan M Davis