Idea for Policy expert reviewer list
I had an idea this morning while working through the Policy backlog and
wanted to see if others think it's worth pursuing.
One of the challenges of some Policy changes is that there can be subtle
nuances that aren't obvious. We currently rely on the seconding process
to ensure that at least a few people have had eyes on any given change,
but that's at the mercy of whoever happens to be reading debian-policy.
Thankfully, many long-time Debian contributors have been willing to keep
up with the list, but Debian is busy and traffic can be bursty and that
may not always be the best use of their time.
The IETF has a concept of expert review for certain types of changes, and
the Linux kernel and other projects use subsystem maintainers to route
patch reviews to appropriate people. I'm wondering if Policy would
benefit from a similar sort of concept: maintaining a list of expert
reviewers.
The idea would look something like this:
* We would keep a list of general Policy areas and a corresponding list of
Debian experts in that area in a file in the debian-policy source
package (but not part of the binary package or published on the web
site). Or we put it in the wiki, but I'm trying to reduce the number of
places people's email addresses get published for spamming purposes
(probably futilely).
* If something in that area comes up, the Debian Policy Editors would cc
the experts in that area once there's a concrete proposal or patch
that's ready for review.
* Anyone who feels like they have deep expertise in an area of Debian and
wants to be listed can just ask us and we'll add them.
This wouldn't be a blocking review necessarily, since people are busy and
sometimes there are expert disagreements that we still have to sort out.
But the point would be to make sure the people with the highest-quality
input would have an opportunity to see any change.
Obviously this wouldn't be necessary for areas of Policy work that mostly
correspond to a single package. In those cases (libc, for example), we
should just copy the package maintainers. But there are a lot of fuzzier
areas, like bootstrapping, the maintainer script execution model, shared
library dependencies, the Perl policy, debconf, and so forth where I know
there are domain experts in Debian but we don't have a systematic way of
involving them in patch review.
If all those folks are happy to read debian-policy, this is sort of
pointless. I'm guessing that's not the case, but I don't really know.
Guillem can also decide if he wants to be an expert reviewer on most of
Policy. :)
What do people think? Helpful innovation, or just extra bookkeeping that
isn't worth the effort? If people do think this is a good idea, I'll
bring it up on debian-devel for further discussion (and then, if we
adopted it, it would be a debian-devel-announce post).
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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