are reviews voluntary?

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Thu, 2013-09-12 at 10:27 +0200, Kai Blin wrote:
> On 2013-09-12 10:06, Michael Adam wrote:
> 
> Moin Michael,
> 
> > Since commit 9e7bce53707732700928eaf2bb53a5f1cc5d7784
> > which was on 2012-10-19, and was the first commit to
> > be pushed under the new proposed reviewed-by/signed-off-by
> > rules, we have:
> > 
> > - a total of 2772 commits
> > - Signed-off-by:  1995 tags by 24 different team members
> > - Reviewed-by:    2771 tags by 25 different team members
> >
> > So your impression that nobody cares does not seem to be justified.
> 
> Right, and apparently it works on a voluntary basis. So why do we need a
> technical solution for something that's not even broken?
> 
> > Of course this slows things down. Doing thorough reviews
> > takes time. But the resulting patches are almost always
> > much better and don't need to be amended afterwards as much
> > as before. So that's worth the pain, imho.
> 
> Do we have a metric for that?
> 
> > Do you have any patches out there pending review? (as most of
> > us do, btw) Then just ping again. Doesn't that work?
> > Of course, reviews are not designed for the impatient. ;-)
> 
> Do you have any example of people purposely pushing code that wasn't
> reviewed after we started doing reviews?
> 
> Again, while I currently don't have a problem, my original worry
> remains: Having a mandatory review policy will divide the developer team
> into the people working on popular areas and the people working on areas
> nobody really cares about. The voluntary review model we currently have
> avoids this.
> 
> If we really need a technical solution and mandatory reviews, we also
> need mandatory response times. I don't think we can give these, so the
> alternative would be the "Reviewed-by: Nobody Cared <nope at samba.org>" tag.
> 
> TLDR; The current voluntary system works. Don't fix it if it ain't broken.

Is what we have voluntary?  

The last time I pushed a patch from someone outside the team and only
reviewed it myself, I got a sternly worded e-mail in reply.  I've not
yet tried to see what would happen if I stopped putting my own patches
up for review, but I've been sorely tempted from time to time.  (I do
know that doing so would start a thread, much like this one).

The feeling I get is that if I was to opt out of this 'voluntary'
system, I would soon be asked to opt out of being on the team.  

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team           http://samba.org