Dave Abrahams wrote:
At Fri, 14 Jan 2011 06:29:16 -0700, Jeff Garland wrote:
In my vision, the reviews for a library are comments on a wordpress article, and the library's documentation links to the review article.
I'd actually like to suggest something that might be more direct. Based on a recommendation from fellow boosters at BoostCon last year we acquired and have been using a web based code review tool for the last 10 months. The impact of this tool has been a dramatic and radical increase in review quality over the email system we had been using -- in large part because all comments/discussion are attached to the actual source code directly for all to see. The tool provides supports the longer review model since someone looking in week 3 of the review can trivially look at all the review comment discussions to that point directly in context with the code. Authors can also update code during the review to address issues and the comment context (and prior versions are maintained). Registered reviewers can also receive email notification when other reviewers comment, etc, etc. Point is, it's a collaboration tool built for code reviews and it works well.
The company that provides the tool allows for free use of the tool by open source projects -- so it's something should be possible for boost. That said, there will be work here to coordinate with the company, setup the boost space and review users, etc. The tool is also highly configurable so we'd have to establish some usage policies and such. All items that we would have to address, but I doubt any are a show stoppers. Course we likely would have to allow folks that want to provide email reviews to continue that way, but overall once you go down this road you won't go back to email.
Note that I'm not mentioning the name of the tool just yet because I don't want to violate our 'advertising policies' on the list.
I think you're being overly cautious. Atlassian?
Fair enough: http://smartbear.com/codecollab.php
If there's interest, I can make initial contact with company and get/post the details on how it would work. I was planning to propose this at BoostCon, but now that it's come up we should start the process now if folks agree.
Using a code review tool is an awesome idea. Many reviews are not attached to code, but you can put review comments in documentation just as well.
Documentation is a bit harder unless you are annotating the document source directly -- that is, I haven't see a mode in the tool to annotate against 'rendered html'.
A couple of things to consider:
1. We'd still need a place for overall assessments that don't pertain to specific details.
There's an 'overall comments' section at the top of each review for these kinds of comments.
2. I know this is a bold predicition, but I think we will be transitioning to GitHub. It has an enormous momentum in the open source world, is responsive, and will continue to make a lot more sense as Boost is modularized. GitHub already supports code review. I think I'd rather go with a tool that requires absolutely no sysadmin on our part, is a known quantity to many already, etc.
I haven't used the github review capabilities here -- so we'd have to evaluate what works best. As for the admin -- it's truly minimal -- basically the same as giving someone sandbox access today -- registering an email address so that comment discussions are tracked, etc. And the author has to upload code to the tool -- but a simple paragraph should be about enough to explain it. Jeff