Re: Workflow changes proposal for 2025
Quoting Otto:
> On Tue, 14 Jan 2025 at 12:45, Nilesh Patra <nilesh@riseup.net> wrote:
> >
> > > Seems you think code reviews are a time waste?
> >
> > Wow. That's a strong statement and assumption.
> >
> > To be clear, I never said that. Please take my statements at face-value.
> > Just that I personally would not have time for reviewing other's MR/PRs.
>
> Sorry, that was maybe too blunt.
> What I intended to ask was, that
> given all of us have limited time to work on Debian, and we have to
> make decision on how to use that time, why do you allocate 0% on Merge
> Request reviews?
That is more or less because there are other things that I want to work
on in Debian that I consider higher in my priority list.
That said, I do not have strong opinions at all. You have somewhat
convinced me to spend some time on code reviews. If someone pings me for
a review, I would not mind spending sometime there, but I don't think I
would do drive-by reviews regularly.
> > JFYI, I am a DD as well. Almost all my packages are team maintained.
> >
> > Even the NM step ensures that a DD knows when to ask for help, and I
> > will seek help when I need it, just like I have in the past.
>
> This seems to indicate that you don't want to have feedback, nor want
> to give feedback, but rather only reach out to other team members *if*
> you have a specific question, and probably assume other team members
> would engage only if they have questions or if they need help.
Don't you think Debian operates a lot like that in general? IRC, mailing
lists, and other communication channels are often used when someone
needs help or feedback on something, rather than for reviews on every
small change, right?
> Personally I am a big proponent of having code reviews and running CI
> *even in the absence of any particular doubt* that something might be
> broken or incorrect. People almost never upload packages that are
> broken intentionally. It is always a surprise to them when they get a
> bug report.
I concur fully with you on the CI part. I enable CI proactively on
packages that I work on.
> By practicing both code reviews and CI we can catch things that people
> didn't think about in advance. This increases quality, which saves
> time in the long run, both for the maintainer themselves and for the
> people who are affected by bugs. [...]
Reading all of this makes me imagine that you probably work or have
worked for a big tech company. The workflow there is quite similar to
what you describe. That works really good when you have a team of paid
software developers working 8h/day but that's not true for a lot of
Debian world. I am not sure if such an approach would scale well in this
context, but I defer that judgement to you.
None of this is meant to denigrate your work, and I am terribly sorry if
I am giving that impression in the slightest. Thank you very much for
taking out your time to draft a new policy, very much appreciated!
Thanks,
Nilesh
PS: My mail client is probably breaking threads, sorry about this. I
will fix that quickly.
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