On Thursday, January 17, 2013, Magnus Hagander wrote:
> Would it help to step up a few developers and create a second line of
> committers ? The commits by the second line committers will still be
> reviewed by the first line committers before they make into the product, but
> may be at later stage or when we are in beta.
Perhaps this is because I've never needed or played with "prepared transactions"; but to me a commit is a commit is a commit. If it isn't in the product, then whatever it was was not a commit.
..
While we can certainly do that, it would probably help just to havae a
"second line of reviewers". Basically a set of more senior reviewers -
so a patch would go submission -> reviewer -> senior reviewer ->
committer. With the second line of reviewers focusing more on the
whole "how to do things", etc.
That order seems partially backwards to me. If someone needs to glance at a patch and say "That whole idea is never going to work" or more optimistically "you need to be making that change in smgr, not lmgr", it is probably not going to be a novice reviewer who does that.
Sometime this type of high-level summary review does happen, at the senior person's whim, but is not a formal part of the commit fest process.
What I don't know is how much work it takes for one of those senior people to make one of those summary judgments, compared to how much it takes for them to just do an entire review from scratch.
Cheers,
Jeff