On 2015-08-27 08:28, Gavin Lambert wrote:
On 27/08/2015 17:40, Roland Bock wrote:
Categories 1 and 2 are utterly useless to me. I appreciate the motives and where they are coming from, but let me be clear in return: if I bring AFIO back in twelve months time after lots more work, and those same people then say the design is fundamentally flawed for reasons X, Y and Z and should be rejected, I am going to be very upset with them indeed. I think anyone would understand where I would be coming from in that response.
So basically you are saying that anyone who votes against your library for reasons 1 or 2 has no right to vote against it ever again, and you will go to virtual war if they do?
No, he's saying that while you're perfectly entitled to say the things in #1 or #2 if that's how you feel, he would prefer that you not just stop there, but also make comments from categories #3 and #4 as well. Thanks, Gavin. That is a very friendly interpretation. And maybe you are right. But even now, reading that statement from Niall again, I feel quite uneasy:
I intend to put items #1 and #2 in my review among other things. I am not happy about being told that this is "utterly useless". The current situation, time constraints and my current level of knowledge prevent me from finding critical flaws. In a potential future review, the situation will be different, as might my knowledge. Thus, I might find a critical flaw later on. I don't know. Maybe not. It is not my goal. But anyway, if I do, Niall is " going to be very upset with [me] indeed". Not cool.
ie. don't use #1 or #2 as a justification to completely refuse to review the library in depth, but instead try to find other things "wrong" with it right now, so that they can be addressed before the next review, instead of first being raised *only then*.
That's an ideal, of course, and people have limited time and may miss things (particularly if docs are incomplete or obscure -- but then *that* should be raised as an issue). And different people will spot different things, which is the whole point of a group peer review.
I agree with the idea of a group peer review of course. But with his last mail, Niall basically introduced a metric to decide which reviews are valid and which are not. I do not think that the author of a library under review is in the position to do that. Things would be totally different if this were a pre-review or any other informal discussion about AFIO. In that case, I would agree with Niall immediately in asking for concrete details instead of potential formal reasons for rejection. But since this is a formal review, I object to Niall trying to install a bias with statements like in his last mail. Best, Roland