Re: Review Manager Volunteers

From: Ivan Matek (libbooze_at_[hidden])
Date: 2025-04-18 18:55:58

On Fri, Apr 18, 2025 at 4:47 PM Peter Dimov via Boost <boost_at_[hidden]>
wrote:

> Andrey Semashev wrote:
> > On 18 Apr 2025 04:51, Peter Dimov via Boost wrote:
> > >
> > > The domain-specific expertise should come from the reviewers; the
> > > review manager should (minimally) just be qualified enough to evaluate
> the
> > > reviews.
> >
> > Reviewers are allowed to be less familiar with the domain, and in fact
> may not
> > be familiar at all. There were plenty examples of such, including myself
> in the
> > recent Boost.Hash2 review. The review manager's job is to weigh the
> quality
> > and relevance of the reviews, and to be able to do that the review
> manager
> > has to be at least as qualified as the reviewers, very preferably more.
>
> For Hash2, we got a review from one of the authors of Blake2 (if we knew
> that
> in advance we'd certainly have included Blake2 in the initial submission.)
>
> I don't think it would have been realistic to expect or demand equal or
> higher
> level of expertise from the review manager in this case.
>
>
I understand the difficulties of finding a review manager, but in this
discussion I am mostly agreeing with Andrey point.
To use your example: there was no guarantee that author of Blake2 would
submit a review. And in my opinion at least one person who is judging the
library needs to be a domain expert.
Now I see two options:

   1. keep the current requirement that manager is a domain expert
   2. drop the requirement that manager needs to be an expert if we are
   confident expert(s) will submit reviews

This way we have at least one domain expert involved with approval. Issue
here is that this complicates the process, by requiring reviewers to agree
beforehand to submit a review, compared to current one where it is much
easier for reviewers to submit a review.

Just to be clear I do understand how difficult is to find anybody to do
unpaid work, not to mention highly skilled domain experts to do unpaid
work, but I believe that beside author at least one person involved in
review needs to be an expert in the domain, and that
general C++ expert knowledge is not enough in general case(counter example
would be variant2 that is "pure" C++ library without need for reviewers or
manager to be experts in unicode or networking or coroutines or ...).