Re: [Qemu-devel] An organizational suggestion

[Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>]

Ian Jackson wrote:
> Jamie Lokier writes ("Re: [Qemu-devel] An organizational suggestion"):
>   
>> It's the Linus Torvalds school of flow control.  If you don't get a
>> reply, try again.
>>     
>
> I see.  That seems rather rude to me, so I don't do it.  Am I really
> supposed to keep a list of my outstanding patches and retransmit them
> like some kind of bandwidth-hogging peer-to-peer application ?
>   

The DCO process can really help here.  The simple fact is that most of 
the committers to QEMU are not paid to be full-time maintainers.  As 
such, their time is limited.  There is a lot of noise on qemu-devel 
(this thread being a good example ;-)).

If you review a patch, and are happy with it, offer an Acked-by.  When 
comitters go through reviewing patches to commit, it makes it much 
easier for them to determine whether a patch should be committed or not.

> If everyone did that, then the number of patches accepted would go
> down rather than up, surely ?  Because everyone would be spending
> their time wading through all these resends, rather than paying
> attention to the content.
>   

Try marking the subject with [RESEND].  Quite a lot of projects require 
patches to be resent.  In fact, in the early days of Xen, this was often 
the case.  [RESEND] tends to be a polite way to help maintainers be more 
responsive too.

> Also - implicit in your comment that it's a form of `flow control' is
> that it's caused by a lack of upstream capacity.  I think that part is
> very true.  We do have a lack of capacity, which can be solved in this
> case by adding one or more people I think.
>   

There are already a lot of committers in QEMU.  There are 9 people with 
commit access to QEMU.  There is only 1 person with commit access to KVM 
and that includes a full copy of QEMU.  What's needed is someone to take 
the time, on a day-by-day basis, to review patches, and queue them.

Magnus posted a list of outstanding patches a while ago, I think that's 
the right approach.  I'll spend some time today to try and collect 
outstanding patches.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

> Qemu is not a very large project in the grand scheme of things, and we
> can hopefully avoid the kind of very cumbersome and heavyweight
> processes which surround the Linux kernel.
>
> Ian.
>
>
>