Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] [RESEND2] Qemu unmaintained?

[Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>]

On 09/10/2009 07:22 PM, Anthony Liguori wrote:
>> You certainly shouldn't ack patches you don't commit!
>
>
> But most spend time in staging.

What's the percentage of patches that make it to master?  For me it's 
 >90%.  If it's too low we nned to fix that.

>
> Acking patches that go to master, that's perfectly fine to do. 

I think that's too late, especially as it often takes a week for master 
to be pushed.  To a submitter, an ack means "no further action is 
required from you at this time" and it's good to provide it as early as 
possible.

> The qemu-commits list does that and should CC the author directly so 
> this should be happening. 

It's too late, and doesn't help others who have an interest in the patch.

> It's acking things that go into staging that I think would be 
> difficult and not necessarily productive.

That is what I do and it doesn't seem to be troublesome.  If I drop a 
patch from a queue I explicitly unack it.

>
>>> This is goofy and is caused by improper patch submission.  But when 
>>> people quote email threads in a commit message, I don't remove 
>>> them.  It don't see it as a problem.
>>
>> From long experience, most commit messages need to be edited.  People 
>> rarely write commit messages that can be understood a year later, and 
>> they don't know how 'git am' works.
>
> I don't like editing patches.  I think it's unfair to the submitter to 
> change their patch underneath of them.  I'd suggest providing feedback 
> on the list to people who write bad commit messages and ask them to 
> write better ones.  I try to limit the changes I make to resolving 
> merge conflicts.

Editing the commit log is not changing the patch.  I doubt you'll be 
able to get better commit messages - submitters have more immediate 
perspectives than maintainers (should have).  I always try to make the 
log make sense a year from now (the code may change, but the commit log 
won't).

Unfairly picking on Mark (who usually writes truly excellent changelogs, 
but this one is such a gem):

> Subject: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 01/19] Suppress more more kraxelism
>
> Let's kick off this series with some of the more critical fixes.
>
> Signed-off-by: Mark McLoughlin<markmc@redhat.com>
>    

What would you be thinking hunting the commit log for some change and 
coming up with this?

(Mark, apologies for picking on you, it's truly unfair of me, but I 
can't help it)

-- 
I have a truly marvellous patch that fixes the bug which this
signature is too narrow to contain.