[Qemu-devel] Re: Networking patches queue

[Anthony Liguori <aliguori@us.ibm.com>]

Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-05-28 at 10:28 -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
>   
>> If the first 6 patches of Jan's series are ready to apply, wouldn't it
>> make sense for him to submit that as a separate series?  In the very
>> least, I'd like an Ack from Jan before applying his series partially.
>>     
>
> I would have thought that was one of the benefits of a clean, bisectable
> patch series - that a maintainer could choose to partially apply them.
>
> I know when I send a patch series, I'm fully prepared for that to happen
> and would much rather see them applied partially if possible, rather
> than re-send the whole series.
>
> (Where partially means 1-N not randomly choosing a subset of patches)
>   

I used to do that, but not everyone likes it.

>> I just got the tail end of your series before heading off on travel on
>> Friday.  It still needs review and testing.
>>     
>
> Okay, that's perfectly reasonable.
>
> I got the impression you would like (at some point) to be able to have
> others to act as a funnel for specific areas. I'm just testing the
> water :-)
>   

Yes, that's what I was hinting at below :-)

>> Of course, if a patches series included test cases for the functionality
>> it was implementing, it would certainly go a far way into reducing the
>> amount of time it took to test those patches :-)
>>     
>
> That's a funny way of observing "we really should have a networking test
> suite".
>
> Would "this tree passes kvm-autotest's networking tests" help matters?
> If so, I'm sure that could be organised ...
>   

Does kvm-autotest have networking tests?

I know there's some concern about the time it takes for patches to get
applied.  IMHO, the best way to improve that it to get a stronger set of
functional tests.  I have a set I've been working on but it's on my
other laptop which I cannot reach ATM :-/

As has been discussed before, I'm looking for finer grain functional
tests than the installation tests that kvm-autotest is providing now. 
I'm not saying that this series requires submitting a test suite first,
but rather that if you're interested in seeing networking advance more
rapidly, a good investment would be to build out a better test
infrastructure for it.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori