Re: [PATCH] ReviewingGuidelines: encourage positive reviews more

From: Derrick Stolee <stolee@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 25, 2024, 13:31 UTC
Message-ID: <3fc33179-cd65-454b-a68e-f1113926eefe@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <ZqH2DK83PoU2786-@tanuki>

On 7/25/24 2:51 AM, Patrick Steinhardt wrote:

Show 14 quoted lines

> On Wed, Jul 24, 2024 at 02:14:37PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> I saw some contributors hesitate to give a positive review on
>> patches by their coworkers.  When written well, a positive review
>> does not have to be a hollow "looks good" that rubber stamps an
>> otherwise useless approval on a topic that is not interesting to
>> anybody.
> 
> Oh, yes, this addition is very welcome indeed! It's a painpoint of ours
> at GitLab, and folks were indeed quite unsure about how to handle
> positive reviews. I was trying to guide them into the direction of
> "reverbalizing" and "thinking out aloud" parts of a patch series that
> are tricky in order to demonstrate that they have indeed read through
> the patches and understand them. Having all of this written down
> explicitly should hopefully help them.

I'll add the perspective of my experience here that this is a good pattern to follow. One thing that also helps is to avoid doing an "internal review" for experienced contributors.

When Microsoft was first building up new contributors in this space, we were overcautious and performed an internal review before going to the mailing list. While this is good for a contributor's first series, it loses the benefits of doing review in the open.

A positive review is great. A constructive review that improves the series is even better.

> Except for the typo mentioned by Eric I don't have anything else to add.
> Thanks!

Same. Thanks for adding this to the official guidelines.

Thanks, -Stolee