Re: Formal Review Retrospective

From: Christian Mazakas (christian.mazakas_at_[hidden])
Date: 2024-11-11 15:45:01

On Sun, Nov 10, 2024 at 9:15 AM Peter Dimov via Boost <boost_at_[hidden]>
wrote:

> It wasn't. If I were the review manager, I would have thought the same.
>
> I don't want to pick on you too much because, in principle, you didn't
> do anything wrong in your review, apart from the insistence that it
> ought to have been counted as "serious". You are fully within your
> rights to leave whatever review you like, with the awareness that it
> would be counted commensurately.

Of course.

I think there's actually been a misunderstanding which has led to a
mischaracterization of me. Which is my fault, in all actuality.

I did a loose drive-by review which is fine. I didn't expect anyone to
actually reject the library just because of my ideas.

I was admittedly disappointed when the author didn't have anything to say,
just thanking me for my review and then promptly moving on.

But the inflection point was when other people on the mailing list said
that I had brought up something worth discussing. This was when the review
manager should've stepped in. And this was also when the author should've
stepped in as well. The fact that they didn't is a poor reflection on them.

This was the first strike. The second strike was when Darryl's review was
also promptly ignored. If we're being honest here, only Darryl's review
should really count, since we seem so insistent on grading others' reviews.

The third strike was when the review manager made an abrupt acceptance of
the library without a summary. The review manager also chose to
specifically thank only the people who wrote acceptance reviews. It was
then called out that one of the accept votes came from a reviewer who
didn't even get an example compiling and running, which is simply a bad
look when choosing to thank a subset of the reviewers.

> To an extent, yes. In principle, it's the review manager's job to give
> you the benefit of the doubt and to try to coax a serious review out
> of you, by for example asking the above questions.
>

 Yup. Thank you. Dialogues require participation from both sides and I was
hoping the review manager would step up and do their job. But more
importantly, this is where the author should've really participated. I've
been told Boost review is equally about reviewing the author as well as the
library.

Boost thrives when it's a lively community of C++ developers sharing ideas
and design trade-offs. This is what should've happened and the community
even asked for it. To me, this review simply subverted the community to
rush the library in. And that's where our process has failed us. The
end-goal isn't to just accept libraries that come our way, but it's to
build a community where people want to participate and great things result
from it. In this case, I'm hesitant to say that happened.

In the future, I can go into more detail though. I chose not to this time
because I didn't want to do a 5000 word dump on the ML, and I instead was
hoping the author would just ask me to elaborate on my ideas. For example,
all the author had to do was ask me: "what would that look like?" and I
would've gone to great lengths to explain it. It seems like in hindsight,
this was a mistake on my part. I should've elaborated and made a stronger
case, which I now recognize. Boost thrives when smart people write smart
things and ultimately, I failed to do that and I own the mistake.

- Christian