Tested-by is more valuable than acked-by, because its empirical.
Acked-by generally means "I don't generally object to the idea of the
patch, but may not have read beyond the changelog". Tested-by implies
"I did something that exercised the patch, and it didn't explode" -
that's on par with an actual review (ideally all patches would be both
tested and reviewed).
Hm. We have a tension here:
* there aren't enough reviewers
* some reviews are more useful than others
While a review by a trustworthy person is invaluable, we don't want to
discourage people from reviewing. A new reviewer's review may not be
terribly useful, but a meta-review may help improve it. Or it could be
a great review.
I guess I'm proposing that we also need to expand the reviewer base, and
to do so we need some kind of reviewer-mentoring or metareview process.
Of course that could just be an extra burden on the existing (small)
trusted reviewer base, but the hope is that over time the reviewer pool
size grows enough to make the effort worthwhile...
Well, any interested parties, really. I use it for original bug
reporters, people who followed up on the report, people who have patches
in a nearby area, people who are known to be interested in the affected
subsystem, people who have reviewed previous versions of the patch, etc...
J
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