Personal experiences/anecdotes of the bzr review processes

[Andrew Bennetts]

Mark Hammond wrote:
> I noticed that the bazaar review process has been discussed here recently,
> and a recent experience of mine is a reasonable example of my experiences
> submitting patches, so I thought it might be worth sharing my perception of
> the process.
[...]

Here are two factors that I think contribute to making this a rough ride for
you:

 1. unlike many active developers, you don't yet have access to merge your own
    changes to PQM.
 2. BundleBuggy doesn't ever “carry over” votes from previous revisions of a
    submission.

For developers with direct access to PQM, a single bb:tweak vote allows them to
go off and make a the changes and immediately send the result to PQM.  In your
case, sometimes a reviewer will vote bb:tweak, and can then make the tweak
themselves and send it to PQM on your behalf, but sometimes a tweak is best done
by the original author — which leads into the second point.  When you send your
tweaked patch, it shows up in BundleBuggy as entirely new, needing two new
votes, etc.

Perhaps for submitting an update of a change in response to a tweak vote, the
process should be to change the subject line to “[TWEAK] add win32utils...”?
Then the original reviewer (and the rest of the mailing list) can see that this
is a submission ready for sending to PQM.

It would be nice if somehow BundleBuggy could show the history of a patch that
has gone through multiple review cycles.  Maybe some text or a link that says
e.g. “Supersedes 2 reviews (Resubmit, Semi-approved)” somewhere?

For you specifically, maybe it's time to upgrade your status to a core developer
with PQM access (and needing only one BB vote).  That would ease a lot of the
pain for you, although it wouldn't address the process issues others might be
bumping into.

-Andrew.