On The Firefox Review Deficit

Mike Connor talks about the diminishing amount of time he can dedicate to reviewing Firefox patches. The thing is, this isn’t a new problem. I’m not bashing Mike at all, far from it. There have always been more patches than reviewers can handle, and some folks have noticed there’s the occasional reviewer MIA. Maybe an idea between more reviewers (of limited possibility considering the depth of knowledge about the codebase required) and long lines would be a sort of patch pre-reviewer, or editor. A person or group who are dedicated to one module, who can give a cursory review of a patch to fix obvious mistakes like typos, pointers to hyperspace, etc., and then if a patch passes their muster it can be put into the queue for the module owner. This would cut down on the number of rookie level errors and worthless patches the busy guys need to look over. Something like teacher assistants in college. Something to think about I guess…