[Buildbot-devel] adhoc code reviews

[Marc-Antoine Ruel]

Hi

Just wondering, from what I've seen, when I want to push something to
djmitche/buildbot/master, I just make a push request to Dustin and he
commits it if it looks good to him. Rinse and repeat. And when he
feels like to, he make a new release out of master.

As for most(?) open source projects, there's no real formal code
reviews. No big deal. The only code review tools I know are rietveld
and gerrit, both fairly new, both made by google (first by Guido,
second by Android team). I looked at Rietveld (which is mostly
svn-based and is what we use for Chromium) but it just behaves just
"fine enough" with git. See http://codereview.appspot.com/144075/show
for an example. Note that git-cl makes it bearable with git. I haven't
really played with Gerrit but at least it's 100% git based and is more
logical to use with a git back-end since it understand branches and
can merge automatically. It seems it's quite involved to install.
There's probably other better git-friendly, web-based, open source
code review tools that I don't know of. (?)

One nice side-effect of code reviews is that Dustin can promote
"reviewers" which are the people having commit access to
djmitche/buildbot/master and they can offload the approval process
from Dustin. It can already be done this way but having the review
publicly available is better IMHO.

github gives a patch when sending a pull request but I haven't seen a
way to diff branches from the github web UI otherwise. We can always
do diff's directly in git but there's no real way to see the flow of
patches coming in and comment on them.

So what I want to know:
- Any opinion on code reviews? Just an overhead? Useful to follow
developments? Don't care?
- If so, would people appreciate a basic setup to try it out? Wouldn't
use it anyway?

I start with the premise that status quo is fine.

M-A


git-cl: http://neugierig.org/software/git/?r=git-cl
rietveld: http://code.google.com/p/rietveld/
gerrit: http://code.google.com/p/gerrit/