Code Review Tool

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow

- Linus' Law, according to Eric S. Raymond

Linden Lab maintains an instance of the ReviewBoard code review tool at codereview.secondlife.com to be used for reviewing any proposed changes to any of our open source projects.

Use of this system is limited to developers who have executed a Second Life Viewer Contribution Agreement. Any changes or comments posted to the tool are Contributions as defined by that Agreement.

Logging In

Access to the system requires that you set up an account, which you can do on your own from the login page or by going directly to the account registration page.

When creating your account:

• Please use the same user id that you use for Jira.
• Use the same email address that you use for the opensource-dev mailing list (if you do not, then the notices of reviews you post and comments you make will not be successfully sent to the list).
• Select the 'Viewer' group

You may find yourself on the account creation screen again after you log in, if so, just follow the My Dashboard link:

The Dashboard displays reviews and lets you select the ones of interest to you. See the full Dashboard documentation.

Post Code To Be Reviewed

Prepare your change in a local working hg repository. It will be easier to keep track of outstanding reviews if you commit your change to that repository before posting it for review.

Once you have a local copy of the change, there are two ways to post it for review:

• Manual Upload using the web page interface
• post-review command line tool

Either way, you must Publish Your Review before any other users will be able to see it or comment on it.

Manual Upload

To create a patch file that shows your change, execute the following command from the top level of your repository:

hg diff -r commit > PATCH

where commit is the revision identifier for your change (if you have not made any other changes, this can just be tip). If you have not committed your change, you can leave off the -r commit, but this is not recommended.

post-review

There is a command line tool called post-review, but it is not very mature and whether or not it works can depend on how you created your mercurial repository. I plan to work on improving this asap - Oz

Commenting

Whenever possible, comment by selecting lines in the file and entering a comment. It makes it much more specific than if you post a general comment.