Open Source Code Reviews?

Posted by Cliff on Saturday April 14, 2001 @07:34AM from the the-more-sets-of-eyeballs-the-better dept.

Wordman asks: "The Slashdot article on making software suck less got me wondering about how open source projects make use of the (by far) best tool for reducing software suckage: peer code reviews. Normally, a project team is assigned a fellow programmer's code to look over and critique; however, with open source projects, the 'team' is not as cohesive and usually scattered geographically. Additionally, most open source projects do not have a 'project manager' the way a company would. So, what experiences have you had with code reviews in an open source project? What was the process? Did it work? If it didn't, what went wrong? How would you go about starting a code review process in an open source project?"

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CVS Hooks by Pilchie · 2001-04-15 19:53 · Score: 2

Well, several open-source projects that I have seen have set up CVS hooks, to send email to a cvs mailing list whenever something is committed. Then at least some people subscribed to the CVS list review the code. As for patches sent in by non-committers, obviously whoever eventually commits the patch reviews it, then the same thing happens, and the list reviews it. All in all I have seen it work quite well on both the Apache Portable Runtime and Subversion projects.
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Pilchie