[Ns-developers] c0de review submission HOWTO

[Mathieu Lacage]

hi all,

After 2 iterations with mirko, I would like to point out a couple of
important issues:

1) When there are multiple iterations over a review (patch submited,
review done, new patch submitted, new review done), it might be easier
to submit a patch _relative_ to the previous patch to help the reviewer
assess what changes you really did. But, it might also be easier to
generate a complete patch: it really depends on the context. Generally,
if you produce a complete patch which is not relative to the previous
review, you _need_ to produce also some explanation text to explain what
you changed such that the reviewer can review these parts without having
to look again at everything in the patch. If you produce a relative
patch, it's ok to not include that explanation because the patch already
contains that information.

2) It helps a lot to _split_ the changes in independent small simple
patches: simple method renames can be done either as a separate
preparation patch or as a followup patch. These decrease the size of
each patch to review, and thus make it easier to merge these patches
quickly in ns-3-dev.

I know that this is a lot of pain for submitters but it's also a lot of
pain for reviewers so, we really need to figure out a decent way to
handle this process.

Mathieu

On Tue, 2009-04-14 at 09:03 +0200, Mathieu Lacage wrote:
> (strange title to go through the ns-dev filters)
> 
> hi,
> 
> Since I did not receive screaming emails saying that it was a horribly
> bad idea, I created http://groups.google.com/group/ns-3-reviews/, and I
> would like to suggest everyone who wants to submit a review to:
> 
> 0) download http://codereview.appspot.com/static/upload.py
> 1) record the changes you want to request a review for in a mercurial
> repository: "hg commit ..."
> 2) within the mercurial repository, run upload.py to submit a review
> with http://codereview.appspot.com/. Make sure you specify
> ns-3-reviews at googlegroups.com as a CC.
> 3) Paste your review request on
> http://www.nsnam.org/wiki/index.php/Reviews or send me an email and I
> will add it there
> 4) announce your review request on ns-developers
> 
> thank you,
> Mathieu
>