We've sorta informally done things were revisions have gotten tagged for
some particular person's review as an area of specialty, but we've never
really had formal division of labor among separate parts -- nothing for
instance that can be used to automatically queue things up for particular
peoples' inboxes for timely review.
Often, little things are suitable for many people to look at, but major
subsystem refactorings -- like the landing of Aaron's file backend changes
-- really are specialized and need to be looked over by somebody who's a
specialist, rather than just whoever gets around to looking it over.
I'd like us to seriously consider having primary reviewers for various code
modules, so things like this get handled asap and don't end up falling
through the cracks -- big changes, and small confusing changes ;) -- should
get pretty consistently treated.
Projects like Firefox or the Linux kernel tend to have responsible parties
for various modules, who either manage ingestion of patches through the
source control or issue tracker and do testing, review, feedback, and
eventual merging. I think we would do well to emulate this a little more
explicitly than we do today, especially if we're trying to keep from having
an ever-growing review backlog.
Thoughts? Volunteers?
-- brion