Patch Review Round Guide

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Getting Started

The daily work of PatchSquad will flow around patch review rounds done on certain GNOME modules. The final result of this review round is a report with a list of patches that could be potentially commited straight away. This report must then be send to the module maintainers/developers and module mailing lists. If you want to contribute to PatchSquad, doind review rounds is the best way for doing so.

Things to keep in mind

There are various rules you should keep in mind throughout the review round process:

• Keep in touch with maintainers and other module developers.

  • Your review rounds aims to reduce the workload of maintainers and has direct relation with the GNOME modules development. Try to keep a good communication with maintainers so that you can improve the review quality, do a better prioritization of patches to be reviewed and hence be more helpful to maintainers.

• Share your experiences with PatchSquad.

  • Common problems, cool tricks, review tips are always nice to share with the community.

Necessary preliminary steps

• Read the Preliminary Patch Review guide

• Prepare a development environment with the latest version of GNOME modules with Garnome, Jhbuild or GNOME Developer Kit.

• Join relevant mailing lists

Doing a Review Round

Step by Step

1. First all, you need to choose one module to do the review round. We suggest you to choose modules that you personal interest so that you have more fun by reviewing more patches. Preferably, pick modules that are an official part of one of our suites (Admin, Bindings, Desktop, DevTools, Platform).

2. Send a message to PatchSquad mailing list, telling everyone the module you're about to do a patch review round in order to avoid potential duplicate rounds.

3. To get a list of unreviewed patches of your chosen module, you can use the patch report or the patch diligence report from GNOME Bugzilla. Both reports will give access to the list of unreviewed patches of a certain module.

4. Considering that patch reviewing is a time.consuming activity, if the module has too many unreviewed patches, split the patches in groups and choose only a subset of patches for this round. This way you won't deal with a big amount of patches at once and will give you a stronger feeling of progress. As a general suggestion, start the review round from the simplest patch/bug report to be the most complex ones.

5. Now that you have a list of unreviewed patches, it's time to do the actual preliminary review. First you need to have a development environment with the latest versions of GNOME modules (more specifically the one you chose for the review round). You can do this by building the whole GNOME software stack from its released tarballs with Gargnome, from the subversion repositories with Jhbuild, or by simply using the GNOME Developer Kit. The easiest and quickest aproach is the developer kit because you can easily test patches without having to build the whole GNOME stack. To know how to use the GNOME Developer Kit to build modules and test patches, have a look at this guide.

6. For each unreviewed patch, follow the Preliminary Patch Review guide.

7. After all unreviewed patches received the preliminary review, write a report with a list of bug reports with the reviewed patches and send it to the module maintainers/developers and/or module mailing list.