[Python-Dev] We should be using a tool for code reviews (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Wed Sep 29 21:03:15 CEST 2010

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 11:47 AM, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 11:41, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

On Wed, 29 Sep 2010 11:32:19 -0700 Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

I would like to recommend that the Python core developers start using a code review tool such as Rietveld or Reviewboard. I don't really care which tool we use (I'm sure there are plenty of pros and cons to each) but I do think we should get out of the stone age and start using a tool for the majority of our code reviews.

He, several of us would like it too (although for short patches it doesn't really make a difference), but what's missing is some kind of Roundup integration. Something as trivial as a "start review" button in front of every uploaded patch file would do the trick; it has been suggested several times already, but what's needed is someone to write the code :) The other option (as discussed on Buzz) is to add Rietveld's upload.py to Misc/

A problem with that is that we regularly make matching improvements to upload.py and the server-side code it talks to. While we tend to be conservative in these changes (because we don't control what version of upload.py people use) it would be a pain to maintain backwards compatibility with a version that was distributed in Misc/ two years ago -- that's kind of outside our horizon.

Maybe the upload.py script distributed could just download the most current version from codereview.appspot.com/static/upload.py -- that URL is easy enough to keep stable.

and tell people to use that to submit the patch. Then we simply say to the person submitting the patch, "upload it to Rietveld and paste in the link" or simply require it upfront to encourage people to do the upload in the first place. This would let usage to move forward until we get that "start review" button (wasn't Ezio looking into it?).

Yeah, but it would still not work if they are working in an unpacked tarball -- upload.py requires that you have a VCS checkout of some sort (though it supports SVN, Hg, Git and Bzr).

-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list