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

[Florian Hahn via llvm-dev]

On 29/08/2017 14:23, Alex Bradbury wrote:
> On 29 August 2017 at 12:22, Florian Hahn <florian.hahn at arm.com> wrote:
>> Hi Alex,
>>
>> On 27/08/2017 00:01, Alex Bradbury via llvm-dev wrote:
>>> My proposal is simple: add a new 'Review corner' section to LLVM Weekly to
>>> help highlight patches that need more reviewer input. There are two main
>>> categories I'd like to focus on:
>>> 1) patches from first-time contributors
>>> 2) patches where review activity has died off (i.e. they're 'stuck').
>>>
>>
>> Thanks for your efforts to improve this process.
>>
>> I played around with the Phabricator API a while ago (I think after a post
>> where you suggested improving the experience for first-time contributors)
>> and built a small script that identifies first-time contributors and adds
>> myself as subscriber to those reviews.
>> I shared the script here https://reviews.llvm.org/D37259 .
>> It would need some more work to turn it into a proper script, but I thought
>> it would be a good time to share it now.
> 
> Thanks for sharing, this seems like a really useful starting point.
> One potential direction would be a simple bot along the lines of the
> rust-highfive which assigns at least an initial reviewer from a pool
> of people hoping to help people get started contributing (see
> https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/44134#issuecomment-325454987
> for an example). In the last RFC thread, I think Paul Robinson called
> these 'first responders'. While on the subject of Phabricator bots,
> having one which complains when a patch is posted without llvm-commits
> or cfe-commits subscribed would probably help avoid patches falling
> through the cracks due to a simple oversight.
> 

Excellent points. It sounds like a few simple bots could make the 
process a little bit smoother. It would be great if we could agree if we 
want some "official" bots that live somewhere in the LLVM repository, to 
get started properly.

>> I think it should be relatively easy to find reviews where activity has died
>> off using the API (excluding comments & patches submitted to llvm-commits
>> directly).
> 
> I think using the API to find patches where activity has died off
> might be useful for stats tracking. I'd rather rely on the patch
> author choosing to make a submission for these stalled reviews though,
> as I think part of the deal should be that the patch author asserts:
> 1) They're still interesting in landing the patch
> 2) They've ensured the patch applies cleanly on current LLVM/Clang
> 3) They've addressed any review comments they've received so far
> 

Agreed!

Cheers,
Florian