[LLVMdev] RFC: Code Ownership

[David Blaikie]

On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 9:22 AM, Jan Sjodin <jan_sjodin at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> More power to volunteers!  Hopefully if people talk
>
>>with each other, help each other out, and maintain a friendly and cooperative
>>atmosphere then all problems with code ownership will just come out in the wash.
>
> +1 I think this is where we want the community to be, and the role of the code owners should
> hopefully be minimal.
>
>
>>However another take on the whole code owner thing is that the code owner is
>>the person who has the final say on what goes in and what doesn't, so it is
>>important for the code owner to be the über guru (and having other people
>>override their decisions would just undermine their authority and the whole
>>code owner system).  Personally I don't really buy this, but I can understand
>>the concern.
>
> I don't think this is the role of the code owner. The way I understand the developer policy
> is that the code owner is there to ensure that all patches are reviewed. I would go further
> and say that the code owner is a fail-safe, which means if the code review falls back on the code
> owner, the regular review process has failed,

Not exactly - since this includes post commit review too. Since we
don't have any positive acknowledgement of post-commit review (when
there are no comments being provided) a code owner will generally end
up having to perform any cases of post-commit review in there area
(since they have no way of knowing that someone else also did so if
they provided no feedback).

Certainly if a code owner comes up with some way to manage the
post-commit review of their trusted reviewers using a shared queue,
that could be a way to alleviate some of this load.

(& perhaps it goes without saying, but the owner's responsibility
isn't just to ensure code gets reviewed, but that it gets reviewed by
someone appropriately skilled/knowledgeable in the area)

> and the code owner will have to take some measures
> (any suggestions?) to make people review patches in a timely manner. It will be too easy for people
> to stop reviewing, since they now think there is a code owner, which will do all code reviews, and the
> result might be that person will sooner or later be overwhelmed and drop out.
>
>   It would perhaps be better to have the code owner be someone that has the knowledge, and cares
> about a specific component in the context of quality, capability, design and documentation. But it should
> probably not be the person who is the most frequent contributor to that component (might be difficult to find
> such a person), since since the reviews may be likely to fall back on the same person, and he/she will have
> to keep bugging other people about their own patches, or more likely, patches will go in without review if
> the code owner has a review-after-commit status.
>
>
> - Jan
>
>
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