Honestly, I would love getting more reviews. It’s common that I ask for review to 1 to 4 core developers, and most of the time, I never get any kind of review (even if I wait a few weeks, or months)
If it’s a “review request just for information”, I just wait for 1 day (or even just a few hours): usually, it’s the time for me to “sleep on the change” and review it with a new look I’m now using cc @github-handle
syntax to send a “copy” of the PR to some developers to notify them. At least, they may get my notification later and do a “post-merge” review (I love them, please continue doing that!).
When it’s an important API additional/removal, I wait for a formal review. Usually, either I get a feedback in a few days, or… never
I learnt to adopt the “it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission” approach just to avoid stalling on my work.
Moreover, the lack of “patch series” support on GitHub makes it really painful to work on a long serie of changes. I would prefer to create a “pull request serie” once and wait for a review. Right now, I have to move fast by merging each change, one by one. I do that often for “refactoring” work (no API or behavior change).
I know that my development speed (I’m more available than some other core devs) causes friction time to time with other core developers who would like to be involved in changes, but are not really available to provide feedback. I’m asked to do nothing (in short), until these people are available (which may not happen before a few months).
Other problem to consider is that each core devs have different interest areas, and it’s common that a single dev only really care about a specific topic and so it’s unlikely that they get a pull request (ever!). For example, I saw that problem over the last years in the asyncio module: there were not enough maintainers. I saw that problem is many other areas.
If we require reviews, how to address the lack of available reviewers? Or is the willingness to slow down Python development on purpose? Less changes to break less things!
Maybe if reviews are required, we will see way more devs available to “trade reviews” I do that with a few core devs: they review my changes, in exchange I review their changes In the past, Martin von Loewis offered 1 review in exchange with 5 reviews on his work