Potential improvements to Yvette

Dealing with multiple versions

Several options are apparent:

• Do not move any reviews from the old release to the new release. In essence, this throws them away, since it's presumed that most people will look only at the newest release available.
• Try to move reviews from one release to another. This has its own set of problems:
  • Moving a review from any region (line, subroutine, file, or tree of files) to a region which is not identical is clearly questionable.
  • Even moving a review from a region in the old release to a region in the new release which has not changed is questionable---perhaps the review(s) of that region said what they did because of that region's context. For example, if a function is known to be called in a particular safe way, and nothing that that function does can make it become unsafe, it may have a review that says, "Looks okay like this." But if its caller suddenly changes its behavior, that review may no longer apply.
• Don't move reviews, but somehow link them, so that analogous regions in one release somehow point to the previous release, in way that makes it obvious that this is going on. Of course, even if we do this, one question is what analogous means: only for regions which are byte-for-byte identical? Does this mean line numbers, or actual subroutines, even if they're moved around in the file? What about regions that are merely close---how close is close, and what should we do?
• What tools would make this easier? Perhaps some way of making it easy for someone who has reviewed an old region to move a review to the new release? Such a review would presumably still have to go through the process of getting it signed, which is a fair amount of work; would people do this? How else could we manage the process?

Anyone with good ideas about how to deal with this situation is urged and exhorted to discuss it on the Yvette discussion mailing list, and to contribute code implementing this idea. If you've got a particularly good idea and sample implementation, we'll probably buy you dinner or something as a reward...