774145 - mach command to find reviewer for patch

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1636024

(Firefox Build System :: Mach Core, enhancement)

Description

[Gregory Szorc [:gps]]

Mach should provide a way to easily identify a recommended reviewer for a patch.

What this is really asking for is a way to identify stakeholders in a file. An obvious application is to find reviewers for a patch. But, it could also be used to look up who to contact with questions on a specific file. Perhaps this could interact with the mozillians.org phonebook (is there an API) to retrieve contact information, etc.

I think this goes beyond just `hg blame` because it will need to parse commit messages to extract the reviewer. It's not enough to just look at the author of a commit because they may not be a reviewer.

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

This is interesting. I think that there are really two parts to this, and we should perhaps separate them. 

1) algorithmic part of figuring out who a good reviewer is for a patch
2) exposing that in mach

Part 1 would be equally or even more useful in bugzilla and is one of the short list of bugzilla improvements that we really want but haven't had time for; so I personally think we should try to expose that as a web service that can be access both from mach and from bugzilla.

Comment 2

[Gregory Szorc [:gps]]

(In reply to Benjamin Smedberg  [:bsmedberg] from comment #1)
> This is interesting. I think that there are really two parts to this, and we
> should perhaps separate them. 
> 
> 1) algorithmic part of figuring out who a good reviewer is for a patch
> 2) exposing that in mach

We will definitely separate them. mach is really just a frontend to a bunch of Python modules in the mozbuild (and other) packages. Making everything a library is a requirement for getting r+ on new mach/mozbuild features.

> Part 1 would be equally or even more useful in bugzilla and is one of the
> short list of bugzilla improvements that we really want but haven't had time
> for; so I personally think we should try to expose that as a web service
> that can be access both from mach and from bugzilla.

That's a cool idea! Are there any bugs on file?

Comment 3

[Benjamin Smedberg]

glob says there are no existing bugs files for bugzilla integration, I'll rectify that.
sfink says https://bitbucket.org/sfink/mqext/ has `hg reviewers`

Comment 4

[Jeff Hammel]

Mercy on high this is a great idea

Comment 5

[Josh Matthews [:jdm]]

See https://github.com/bwinton/Mozilla-Tools/blob/master/getReviewer.py for some code that might be integratable.

Comment 6

[Steve Fink [:sfink] [:s:]]

(In reply to Josh Matthews [:jdm] from comment #5)
> See https://github.com/bwinton/Mozilla-Tools/blob/master/getReviewer.py for
> some code that might be integratable.

I think that's the code I started with for mqext's |hg reviewers|. I don't think I added much that was unrelated to the hg integration, though I may have modified the regexes a bit.

Comment 7

[Mike Hoye [:mhoye]]

This one's on me as a q3 goal.

Comment 8

[Saurabh Anand [:sawrubh]]

A polite little bump. Any action going on? I would love to have this feature!

Comment 9

[Steve Fink [:sfink] [:s:]]

I don't know of any activity, but just to be sure you're aware of the status quo:

- mach mercurial-setup will install mqext, which includes an |hg reviewers| command.
- |hg reviewers| by default will look at the top patch in your mq queue.
- |hg reviewers -f <filename>| will give you reviewers for a particular file.
- the IRC bot "mrgiggles" will run the above command for you. Example:

  /msg mrgiggles who has reviewed nsJSEnvironment.cpp?

will give you back a response like

  smaug x 59, mccr8 x 24, bz x 19

(You'll also see people ask publicly in channels that mrgiggles hangs out in, usually using the syntax "who can review XXX.cpp?". And if you want mrgiggles in another channel, just /invite him.)

None of this is to say that this bug is unnecessary. It would be best if this functionality were incorporated into mach.

Comment 10

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco]]

The bug assignee is inactive on Bugzilla, so the assignee is being reset.