[FFmpeg-devel] Project orientation

[Michael Niedermayer]

On Sun, Jul 05, 2020 at 08:42:13PM +0200, Steinar H. Gunderson wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 05, 2020 at 08:13:25PM +0200, Manolis Stamatogiannakis wrote:
> > As a fresh contributor, setting up git send-email was a hassle, but
> > not an insurmountable obstacle.
> 
> Speaking only for myself, having sent a single-digit number of patches
> to FFmpeg ever: Setting up git send-email was not a big turnoff. 

> Having your
> patch being not responded to (whether being forgotten, not found interesting
> enough, or whatever other reason) was.

At least for me the reason to not review a patch is often simply
time.
But i agree the amount of not reviewed patches is a problem.

How can we solve this ?
From a mathematical point of view
either more reviews must happen or fewer patches have to be sent.

Fewer patches would only make sense if they are replaced by selfreview and
direct commits. This could reduce the load on reviewers. We did this
in the past and we had fewer non reviewed patches back then. I do not know
what peoples oppinion is about this but there has been opposition to
this long ago when it was commonly done.

The second thing is more reviews.
That can happen by
* More reviewers
* More reviews per reviewer
* Less work per review

To Achieve this, we could try to
* attract more developers doing reviews, i have generally suggested
  contributors to help review other peoples patches. Maybe i should
  take a step back and ask developers to ask developers to do this
  instead. It is a way out of this problem
* make people have a burning desire to review patches. I understand
  this would work very well but iam not sure how to achieve this
* pay developers to do reviews, i think we do not yet have the funds
  for this as reviews take alot of time and thus this would not be
  cheap
  
Also to make reviews less work
* Code documentation should be improved
* Testcases in fate should be mandatory for newly added "parts", this allows
  easy testing of changes and allows filtering out some bugs automatically
  
Some simple suggestion
* If you submmit a patch and its reviewed by someone, please pick some
  other patch by someone in an area you reasonably understand and review it
  (If everyone does this we have no lack of reviewers anymore)
  
Anyway i dont think the unreviewed patches amount is a unsolveable problem
  
Thanks
  
[...]

-- 
Michael     GnuPG fingerprint: 9FF2128B147EF6730BADF133611EC787040B0FAB

Those who are best at talking, realize last or never when they are wrong.
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