Patch review bandwidth has been identified as a bottleneck for GCC development many times over the years. We have taken steps to address it, such as appointing people in reviewer roles. But we can do more to reduce the friction for contributors to try patch review.
I will present some motivation to start reviewing patches and address common perceived barriers to doing so.
One take away from advocating for upstream patch review among colleagues is that there are no good set of guidelines to refer to when reviewing patches. In this talk I propose a set of baseline guidelines for patch review for the GCC project that can act as a starting point for budding reviewers. These can include technical design conventions that we want to maintain, common mistakes to look out for, testing and benchmarking considerations, commit message reviews, deployment concerns, and more high-level, social etiquette and procedural considerations.
I am interested in feedback on these guidelines and ideas on how and where we may want to advertise them for newcomers.
