Re: Code review [Was: GNA is down...}

[David Chisnall]

On 14 Feb 2012, at 08:43, Sebastian Reitenbach wrote:

> Code review is usually done before its commited to the main tree. For each 
> part of the tree, there is at least one, sometimes more maintainers.
> If you have changes, you figure out, who is the maintainer, and send the 
> patch for review.

There are better tools for this.  For a while for Étoilé Nicolas ran 
ReviewBoard[1], which let you upload a diff and let other people inspect it 
against the current svn head.  LLVM has a mechanism that works the other way 
and scrapes the llvm-commits mailing list for patches as attachments and 
presents them in a web interface (I'm not sure what this uses, but I could find 
out).

For post-commit reviews, pretty much anything supports showing the diff in a 
convenient way.  I usually look at GNUstep changes using viewvc on GNA, which 
lets you inspect a revision, see what has changed, and inspect diffs for 
everything.  Fossil has a similar functionality built in (and, because the web 
UI can run locally, you can see the same interface whether connected or 
disconnected).   Github has a version that reflects the git philosophy: more 
features, worse UI.

> Important here is to send a patch inline, not as attachment.

The down side of this is that mail clients and mailing list software have a 
habit of mangling diffs sent inline, so you often can't apply a diff sent this 
way.  You can do code review, but not testing.  

David

[1] http://www.reviewboard.org/

-- Sent from my Difference Engine