[Development] (To what extent) Should we start the API change review earlier ?

[Edward Welbourne]

Volker Hilsheimer (2 May 2023 10:57) wrote:
> With Qt 6.5 out for a while already, and roughly a month to go until
> Qt 6.6 feature freeze and the start of the various activities that
> lead up to the release, it’s perhaps not too early to review some of
> the pain points we experienced with 6.5, and discuss how we can
> improve.

One pain point that came up at the time was that the reviews don't get
enough attention; another that we maybe need more time.  I think the
first of those is somewhat covered by one of your other sub-threads.

> In particular, the header review was particularly laborious this time
> around, and I would like to see what we can do to make it less so next
> time around.

I like that plan.

> This email is the anchor for various topics. I’ll start with a few
> threads with things that I remember and feel could be improved. If you
> have something new, please start a new thread in reply to this email, ...

OK, then (see Subject):

We could simply start the review earlier.  The only real significance of
the feature-freeze is that it's the cut-off for changes to API, aside
from the changes to changed API that get prompted by the review.  So we
could perfectly well start that earlier, and maybe get some of the fixed
changes in before feature-freeze.  OTOH, that would be more work for the
release team, having to update the reviews more times.

Another approach would be for Maintainers to run the scripts [0] on
their modules locally and have a look for anything in the result that
looks like it needs more eye-balls on it.  They can either dig up the
original gerrit reviews of the changes and drag relevant eye-balls to
take a look at that, or fake up a commit based on the one the
api-review-gen script produced, that captures the particular piece(s)
they want reviewed and push that to gerrit.

[0] they're in qtqa/scripts/api-review/, stick that in your PATH and run
    api-review-gen --help
    for details.  You'll need the dulwich python package installed.

Incidentally, if anyone does run these scripts for themselves and finds
difficulties with that, I'd love to hear from you, via Jira if you think
it's worth it.  The "break up git modules by Qt module" feature request
already exists, QTQAINFRA-4763.

What (else) could we do to make the review run more smoothly and quickly ?

	Eddy.