Reviewing Janitor Changes

Before changes are including in a merge request or pushed to a repository, they are reviewed by a human. Reviews are done on the review page in Debian Janitor's cupboard (the admin portion of the site).

Anybody can review, but only an approval by somebody in the Debian Janitor review team will trigger publishing of the changes. Reviews are displayed at the bottom of each page.

The process

When you go to the review page, runs are displayed one-by-one. For each run, a couple of items are displayed:

• the commit messages for the new revisions
• the source diff (e.g. output of "git diff") for each of the affected branches (usually just one)
• the debdiff of between a build with and without the changes (the control build)
• a link to a diffoscope diff between a build with and without the changes - this is usually much larger
• a link to the full run
• buttons to do the review

Any change that gets to this stage would have been successfully built, and passed autopkgtest (if present).

Once you have reviewed a change, click the appropriate button (or use the shortcut in parentheses):

• Approved: if the change looks good (Alt+a or Alt+Shift+a)

• Reschedule: if the change should be redone (i.e. if there's a known fixed bug), and then reviewed again (Alt+s or Alt+Shift+s)

• Reject: if the change is bad (this will prompt for a reason) (Alt+r or Alt+Shift+r)

• Abstain: if you're not comfortable approving the change, and would like to review the next (Alt+n or Alt+Shift+n)

Once you have reviewed a change, you'll automatically be taken to the next run.

Rejections are regularly reviewed, and used as a basis for e.g. bugs.

Caveats

Noisy binary diffs

The binary diff can sometimes be a bit noisy for packages that are not yet reproducible, or if there was a long time between the build of the change and the control build (see also this bug. In this case, you may want to just reschedule.