How does the PatchSquad help you?

• as a volunteer, it's one of the best ways to learn a project
• as a maintainer, we lighten your load by pointing out potential problems in submitted patches so that you don't have to
• as a patch submitter, we try to point out potential problems in your patches so that you can fix them before one of the maintainers looks at it
• as a new contributor, we shorten the delay for getting feeback from the community about your contributions and keep you motivated

There is also a secondary effect of the PatchSquad that we hope to achieve -- helping maintainers identify contributors capable of official patch review or module co-maintainence. There is a chicken-and-egg problem in getting more patch reviewers that we think the PatchSquad can help fix. This was motivated by a blog post from J5 entitled "D-Bus and the Patch Approval Process" which we have repeated below with some minor edits:

• Most patches to the core library need to be reviewed and ok'ed by an approved reviewer before it can be checked in. This is an attempt to catch bugs before they are introduced into CVS and also to allow people to comment on the direction before we commit to it....The biggest problem with this process is those who are not on the approved list tend not to comment and as those on the approved list get distracted elsewhere patches will start to block progress. The solution is to place more people who know the code well enough on that approved list. The problem there is if they are not vetting patches already it is hard to gauge if they will be a good patch reviewer. The problem for those not on the list is they might feel timid about reviewing someone else's code specifically because they are not on the list.

  Patch review is probably one of the best ways to learn a project (well, that and implementing TODO items that are not necessarily ones area of expertise). People should not be afraid of being corrected if they miss something or feel that they should not offer their eyes to the problem if they are not on some list. The more eyes the better. Many people feel right at home commenting on the bigger issues and it should be the same when it comes down to the code.