[QGIS-Developer] A plea: more volunteers needed for reviewing backports

[Nyall Dawson]

On Thu, 8 Apr 2021 at 18:26, Julien Cabieces
<julien.cabieces at oslandia.com> wrote:
>
>
> Hi Nyall,
>
> We (at Oslandia) heard your call for more volunteers in reviewing the backports and PRs.
>
> We are very well aware that our contribution effort for this task is not enough. I see mainly two reasons:
> - Lack of time and human ressources to fullfill this task. This is a bad reason, and a well known situation that we need to take care of internally, to free our schedule.
> - A very partial knowledge of the code base in which we feel relevant to review. I try myself to review all Oracle related PRs, or take a look in some part of the code I know enough to make a good review,

It would certainly be remiss of me not to acknowledge your hard work
in maintaining the Oracle provider over recent months -- it's
certainly very highly valued!

> but it's very little compared to the QGIS code base.

This is where things get really tricky. We do have a very small pool
of people with the required expertise to handle the reviewing process,
and it's a very fine balancing act of "opening this up to a wider
community" vs "ensure that nothing nasty gets through". I don't have
any easy answers here, but a few random thoughts:

- ANY review is appreciated, even if it's just a "I had a look at this
and the c++ code looks good to me, but I'm not familiar with the QGIS
raster api so can someone else check this part out".
- There's a lot of "chore" work in the pr review process which has a
lower barrier of entry. For instance guiding new contributors through
the QGIS processes such as the formatting scripts and CI setup. We
regularly get PRs from first-time contributors and they almost always
need some mentoring in the QGIS processes before they pass the CI
setup and are ready for an in-depth review. This is the kind of thing
which we should ideally do ASAP, as the faster we get the contributors
through the initial maze of QGIS contributions the more likely they
are to continue to contribute.
- We've discussed this before, but a quick comment from a
non-developer on new contributors PRs to say "great work, welcome
abroad, this sounds like a very valuable contribution" is enough to
give the project a positive vibe and give motivation to the submitter
to get their PR in shape to merge
- PR reviewing is a great way to learn new parts of the QGIS codebase ;)

> I hesitated answering your first email, saying basically that we will try to improve the situation, but it would have been just a promise, and I'm not sure that we would have been able to keep it, regarding the points I described above.

I really appreciate the reply, and the time you've taken to drop your
thoughts into this conversation!

Nyall




>
>
> Kind regard,
> Julien
>
> > On Tue, 23 Mar 2021 at 09:06, Nyall Dawson <nyall.dawson at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi list,
> >>
> >> This is a public plea for more developers who are very familiar with
> >> different parts of the QGIS codebase to become actively involved in
> >> backport PR management.
> >>
> >> We NEED more people to be actively (i.e. daily) monitoring for
> >> backport PRs and then reviewing them if the backport affects code
> >> areas which they're knowledgeable about.
> >>
> >
> > Well my earlier plea seems like it fell on deaf ears, and we've seen
> > only minimal assistance coming to maintain the PR queue since I posted
> > this.
> >
> > I'll ask nicely once more. If you're an organisation involved in QGIS
> > development, you NEED to donate time to maintaining this list. It's
> > not enough to just ensure your own PRs get through the queue, you HAVE
> > to help with the shared burden of getting others PRs reviewed and
> > merged.
> >
> > This callout applies to ALL organisations who are making money from
> > core QGIS development. You know who you are, and you can ALL afford to
> > donate 30 minutes of a staff member's time each week to helping with
> > this shared burden. If your boss is blocking this then you NEED to let
> > them know how big a risk they are running here. It's not fair to leave
> > this responsibility on the already burdened shoulders of a few
> > overworked individuals.
> >
> > Nyall
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