[llvm-dev] [RFC] 'Review corner' section in LLVM Weekly

[Hans Wennborg via llvm-dev]

On Mon, Aug 28, 2017 at 8:04 AM, Alex Bradbury <asb at asbradbury.org> wrote:
> On 27 August 2017 at 00:01, Alex Bradbury <asb at asbradbury.org> wrote:
>> Hi all. I'm assuming most people reading this email are familiar with LLVM's
>> code review process <http://llvm.org/docs/DeveloperPolicy.html#code-reviews>
>> as well as LLVM Weekly, the development newsletter I've written and sent out
>> every Monday since Jan 2014. Since that time, it's provided something of a
>> "signal boost" for important mailing list discussions and commits. I feel it
>> could play a similar role in helping patches that are stuck waiting for code
>> reviews, or drawing attention to submissions from first time contributors.
>> There may be alternative or complementary approaches to tackling this
>> perceived problem we should discuss - I'm coming from a position of trying to
>> apply the tools I have at my disposal. Also see my previous thoughts on this
>> issue <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2016-November/106696.html>.
>
> Hans Wennborg suggested on Twitter that bugs could also be included. I
> can't write a coherent response in 140 characters, so am responding
> here.

The reason I brought it up is because I think the situation is
somewhat similar to stalled reviews; in fact forgotten bug reports are
even worse in a way: if no developers are cc'd on the bug, the pings
don't go anywhere -- no mailing list, no nothing. At least with code
reviews, pings usually go to one of the -commits lists.

> I think that highlighting important bugs is also a useful activity,
> but I have less faith that there's something LLVM Weekly can do to
> help here. There may be some value in highlighting bugs which are
> release blockers (though I already try to make sure I link to any such
> list when posted by the release manager) or a selection of 'beginner'
> bugs, (props to Brian Gesiak for pushing for this category). But
> beyond that, how do you decide which bugs to highlight? With patches,
> it's normally the case that a highly motivated party (the patch
> author) has put in the majority of the work, and a relatively smaller
> amount of incremental effort is required from others in the LLVM
> community (code review). With bugs it's the other way around - a huge
> amount of additional work might be required to properly diagnose and
> address a bug report.
>
> I'm totally open to trying something if you think there's a way LLVM
> Weekly can have an impact in this area, but I'm less hopeful about the
> potential impact in reducing the number of open bugs.

What I was thinking when I replied to your tweet was something like
"bugs filed in the last 7 days which no-one seems to have looked at",
or something similar. Hopefully it should be possible to build the
list automatically.

I'm not sure how large that list would be each week though, or how
useful it would be. Also, this might be something we should fix by
having a better bug triaging process in general.

Cheers,
Hans