I'm having trouble reviewing patches via email

Bryan O'Sullivan bos at serpentine.com
Thu Dec 20 14:03:00 CST 2012


I'm trying my best to review patches from people on a fairly regular basis,
and I'm having (what feels to me like) an increasing amount of difficulty
keeping up with them via email.

I suspect I'm not alone in this difficulty, so I thought I'd open this
subject up for a bit of discussion.

The one thing that works sort of well about email at the moment is that
everyone gets to see a reviewer's comments. If I think of any other
advantages, I'll follow up with them.

Current weaknesses:

People often revise patchsets several times, meaning that I have a ton of
old, irrelevant mail to dig through, and it's very hard for me to tell
whether I'm even reviewing the right patchset.

I see a lot of traffic about patchsets that I don't really care about, but
they have essentially the same visual priority as patchsets I do care
about, so making the needle-in-haystack problem worse.

I sometimes completely fail to review patches simply because they slip
through the cracks. Almost as bad is when I think "I can't look at this
now, I'll do it tomorrow" and then a ton of new patches come in, the one I
was going to look at slips off the screen, and I finally unbury it again a
month later.

I can't see a patch in context, so my comments are often limited in scope,
or I have to dig around in a repo to figure out what's going on.

I can't tell whether a reviewed patch will apply cleanly without applying
it by hand.

All of these problems have already been addressed by various web-based
reviewing tools, including the important "send a copy in a readable form to
everyone for education and posterity" criterion.

Am I alone in feeling like the current process isn't serving me well?
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