On Fri, 14 Mar 2014 12:34:02 +0100
Stephan Kulow
Hi,
The opensuse-review-team is likely the most important part of the Factory development process as without them our packaging guidelines are just words. They take what the openSUSE packaging community accepted as guidelines, and make sure they are implemented consistently.
You can read about their work on the wiki: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:OpenSUSE_review_team http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Factory_review
Now the problem is the ever increasing amount of reviews to do. Most of you will not be aware of it, but they do between 400 and 600 reviews *EVERY WEEK*, so the whole Factory development gets in trouble if one of the current review team is on vacation and that's just not how it should be.
So before I call the tributes of openSUSE (sorry to everyone who doesn't know the book :), I would like to have an open call for volunteers. There has been one around half year ago, but it didn't really work out too well, so I would like to give it another round. Unfortunately the requirements didn't change since last time, so we just have to have better luck this time.
So what is expected from the perfect reviewer?
Foremost he needs to be a friendly guy, who can still say no. This sounds easy, but one of the hardest task in review is returning a 'yes, but' instead of 'no'. It can be very tiresome to explain the 20th packager that week about a policy (change), but if you declined 19, the 20th still deserves an answer.
It happens that submitters don't accept the no and want to discuss, so some willingness to talk to people is also important, including the other reviewers. And it surely you need to have some expertise with openSUSE packaging, but reviewers don't have to be packaging superheros - they will become one fast enough when looking at dozens of requests a week. A good common sense to start with is better than a good knowledge of the latest bash tricks.
My goal is to roughly double the number in the review team, so it's less work for everyone - or more time per review, but you shouldn't volunteer unless you really want to take your part of the 400 to 600 reviews a week. Which brings me a last requirement: you need to have extra time to spare.
I know I'm asking for a lot, but I'm also offering a lot of responsibility for openSUSE to share. And I hope everyone agrees that the we're in pretty good shape generally if our biggest problem are too many submissions to review - so let's fix that too by embracing the team that did it so well in the past.
Greetings, Stephan
If no one objects, sign me up. I've been through enough reviews as a submitter to know what is a good SR and the ones which need some more love and care. I've learned to say no nicely and say why I'm giving a decline. I'm not going to promise to devote 20 hours a week and I will decline to review packages where I do not have enough expertise, but 12 years of packaging has taught me the ability to parse packages for quality pretty quickly. Cheers, Peter -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+owner@opensuse.org