Trying to get review

It seems pretty random how long review takes. Most of the Firefox patches I have submitted have never gotten reviewed (in the 6+ months they've been in Bugzilla now), even one that fixes a known crash. Most of the bugs that affect SeaMonkey have gotten review, either approved or denied, with a day or two of requesting it. Same with requests of mscott about Thunderbird. I realize Ben is extremely swamped with work trying to get Firefox 0.9 out the door, but it would be nice if the other module peers could find some time for reviews. Or if Firefox doesn't really welcome outside patches, say so rather than having people waste their time contributing them.

You should set the review? flag AFAIK - at least this is the case when you set the blocking flag.

I think you should set the review0.9? flag in this case.

On this page on the Mozilla website I found this line of text:
http://www.mozilla.org/hacking/reviewers.html

"Note: ben@bengoodger.com has the authority to grant super-review, but will not review patches at this time."

Good luck!

Review is really a joke (at least for Firefox). There simply aren't enough people to get to the patches, so you'll probably be waiting a while.

I've got two patches sitting waiting for review right now. Both are one-line fixes, and neither can possibly present a problem (the addition of one line of JS and the changing of an obsolete URL). I don't expect either will be reviewed until *possibly* before 1.0; I think they're unlikely to make 0.9 - not because they're hard to test but rather because no one has the time.

There are a limited number of reviewers. And of course most reviewers for FF also review for TB and Seamonkey. They all have huge queues of pending requests. Unless it's a high priority item, like a crash, you're low on the list.

Comment by alanjstr at April 10, 2004 05:43 AM | Permalink

All the people here are explaining why getting a _review_ could take a long time. The real problem is that getting a _response_ takes a long time. That's totally unacceptable. It takes all of 10 seconds to type "I won't be able to review this any time soon; please ask one of X, Y, and Z." Not providing some sort of response soon after getting a review request just indicates a lack of respect for the effort of others.

I agree with Boris.
Although in Ben's defense, as mentioned above, it looks like he's too swamped with things to do, and can't review at the moment ("Note: ben@bengoodger.com has the authority to grant super-review, but will not review patches at this time.")

Gemal, have you thought about contacting Blake/Hayatt/ or someone else directly (pm, e-mail)...

This is a major problem with Firefox, but I don't see a remedy until more devs start hacking directly on Firefox or more are hired by the moz foundation.

Henrik, you are just experiencing what everyone who contributes patches to Firefox is experiencing. The whole review-stuff is a total mess.

Ben does review patches only if you bug him via mail (try ben@mozilla.org, the bengoodger.com-addresses are heavily spam-filtered and most of the stuff that goes there is sent straight to devnull (that is what Ben told me). You can also try to contact Ben on IRC. He is normally available under the nickname Ben, Ben_, or BenG. Just type "/whois nickname" to see if he's online.

Blake comes and goes every six months, reviews a few patches and then leaves again.

Hyatt doesn't do any active work on Firefox anymore.

Pierre (pch) tries his best, especially if you ask him on IRC for a review.

Bryner is the best of the bunch and is normally pretty quick with reviewing. But he only reviews stuff that lies in his area (password manager, build system stuff).

What drive me nuts are two things:
First, the lack of respect for the work of others as Boris is saying. I understand, that Ben wants to have a strong grip on all UI stuff, but that is no excuse in itself. If he is unable to handle the load alone, he should appoint one or a few good hackers who he trusts enough in UI design.

Second, I can't understand why we need peer-review from one of these four people (I don't count hyatt) for a simple one- or two-liner patch correcting a typo somewhere or fixing some javascript stuff.