At ​April 2010 Meeting we talked about what is good and sad about the current state of code reviews. Here's some points that showed up:

Bugzilla Advantages:

• Strong link between review and bugs and commit queue - integration
• Comments are emailed out automatically
• Full pretty printed diff
• Patch history
• Web based
• Intra-line diff hightlight
• Command line access to initiate review
• Very low downtime
• Low incompatiblilities
• Fast
• Multiple unrelated patches in a single bug

Bugzilla Caveats:

• Inefficient line by line review
• Diff between "patches revision" inside a bug
• General unrefinement of bugzilla
• No draft saving
• No statistics about the patch properties on the bug report page (number of lines, new layout tests, etc)
• Navigate the patch at the file level
• Lack of context for each diff chunk
• More granularity in "review result", to improve the clarity of the communication, like "r+ but with small changes"
• Unclear accronyms (what does r+ means?), ramping up. Use more English words (?)
• Review progress, especially in the case of multiple reviewers (who review which parts)
• Lack of key bindings
• Review on a cell phone / tablet (at least basic tasks)
• It would be nice if there was only one account - DO NOT add a third account
• Email based review
• Syntax based highlighting

Don't care:

• Review on top of review, on top of patch
• Full commandline access
• Single patch affecting multiple bugs

Requirements for replacement:

• Keep similar process, integration in bugzilla

Action Items:

• Prototype, prefer a dual-review system during transition, if a transition ever occurs.
• Any prototype should update back bugzilla to stay in sync.
• Fixes to bugzilla work flow are welcome

Alternatives:

• Just incrementally fix caveats in bugzilla. Here's an example to start off: ​http://blog.fishsoup.net/2009/09/23/splinter-patch-review.
• ​Rietveld. Nice, as some issues and requires significant integration effort.
• ​Gerrit2. Nice but requires git.
• ​Review board. Some ​people pushing Mozilla to use it but no progress.