when the fever breaks

The day after I returned home I came down with a horrendous fever that left me shivering in bed for the last two days. It finally broke yesterday evening and I'm feeling 90% now, which is about 10,000% better than I was a few hours earlier.

Better than beating the bug, however, was news that we now have an "official" KDE review board installation. We've been using review board in Plasma for nearly a year now and it's been a terrific tool in helping with the peer review of non-trivial patches before they go in. My experience tells me that once code goes in, the chances of fixing problems with it often go down slightly, or even dramatically depending on whether the submitter is a regular contributor or not.

What makes a patch "non-trivial" also varies in definition depending on the submitter and we've found that review board can be a nice set of training wheels for new contributors. Most importantly, though, it prevents losing patches on mailing lists. Since review board integrates with mailing lists, all discussion around patches for a given project can appear on the respective mailing lists as well, so it's certainly both/and: you get mailing list activity and a place where patches are collected.

The inline commenting, threaded discussion and screenshot support are also really nice.

So if you'd lik to take review board for a spin for your KDE-hosted project, run over to the reviewboard.kde.org now and register!

Thanks to people at VMWare for contributing this fine piece of software to humanity, and to David Solbach for being a terrific sys admin and setting it all up!