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Code Review

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Sebastian Ehlert edited this page Aug 16, 2021 · 1 revision

Make sure you have an account on GitHub - if not, go to www.github.com and sign up.

On this page you can browse pull requests that you might be able to review.

There are a couple of ways to review and comment on pull requests:

  1. The easiest is to use the GitHub page for the pull-request to browse the code. You can use the Commits and Files changed tabs to look at the changes. Based on this you can make comments in the Conversation tab. That’s helpful to sort out high-level issues, but won’t show up as a formal “review”.

  2. Typically it is useful to work with the code itself, at least for non-trivial pull requests. See below for how to copy the code to a branch of your local stdlib repository.

  3. Finally you can make a review via the GitHub web page. To do this go to the webpage of the pull request, and click on the Files changed tab. If you are logged into github, note in the source-code display you can click on the code and make comments. To do the review you should make a bunch of comments on the code.

  4. Changes can be suggested by using selecting a line or several lines of code in the Files changed tab. Create a new comment and use the Suggest changes button. Suggested changes can be applied directly in the afterwards

  5. Finally, use the Review changes button at the top-right to submit a review along with comments. Then you’re done.

In doing a review it is a good idea to compile the code, run it, and check a few cases. However as a reviewer you should not feel obliged to write an extensive test-suite. Rather, you should confirm that the test-suite provided in the pull request is sufficiently convincing. If it is not the case, by all means suggest new tests. If you have done them and can provide actual code, you can present and discuss it via the Conversation tab.

How to copy the pull-request code into a branch of your local stdlib repository

To do this you first need a local copy of the stdlib git repository. If you don’t already have it, running

git clone https://github.com/fortran-lang/stdlib.git

in a terminal will copy it into your working directory. If you cd into the stdlib directory and type

git branch

you will see you have the master branch.

To look at the code for the pull request, you can make another branch that contains it. To do this, notice there is a number associated with each pull request, e.g. from the website we see this one https://github.com/fortran-lang/stdlib/pull/272 has number 272. To download this code into a new branch of the local copy of stdlib, do

git fetch origin pull/272/head:BRANCHNAME

where BRANCHNAME should be replaced with the name of the new branch you want to make (e.g. you might use pullreq_272 in place of BRANCHNAME). Best if the chosen name does not match any of your existing branches.

After running the fetch command above, nothing appears to change. However git branch will show that you now have the new branch in addition to the master branch. The command

git checkout BRANCHNAME

will then take you to that branch (again, replace BRANCHNAME with whatever you named it). At this point you can look at the source code, compile it, etc. At the end of that, you can get back to the master branch with

git checkout master
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