Re: [Qemu-devel] We need more reviewers/maintainers!!

[Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>]

On 03/12/2012 12:34 PM, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
> On Mon, 12 Mar 2012, Anthony Liguori wrote:
>> On 03/12/2012 12:06 PM, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
>>> Hi all,
>>> I don't mean to steer any controversy or start any flame wars here, but
>>> rather I want to point out a problem in the QEMU Community that is
>>> preventing us and other people from having a good experience working
>>> upstream with QEMU. Call it constructive criticism.
>>>
>>> Patches are being posted to the list that don't get any reviews at all.
>>> Other patches get reviewed the first time, then once they are reposted
>>> they don't get any other reviews or acked-by or reviewed-by.
>>
>> In all fairness, QEMU continues to grow year-to-year both in terms of total
>> commits and number of contributors.
>>
>> The area that we struggle with is infrequent contributors that contribute
>> non-trivial things and are write-only contributors.
>>
>> In this case, I really think the problem is expecting to be a write-only
>> contributor.  Part of participating in a community is not only pushing your own
>> patches for acceptance but also reviewing other people's patches and
>> participating in the discussion.  If everyone only sends patches and doesn't
>> review patches, then we'll never make progress.
>>
>> So I'd strongly suggest trying to spend some time reviewing other people's work.
>>    Right now, there are at least four different efforts around migration yet I
>> don't see any of the people reviewing the other efforts.  I think this is really
>> the main problem.
>
> Point taken.
> However maintainers should also be responsible of reviewing patches of
> "infrequent write-only contributors".
>
> I certainly do it for the areas I am a maintainer of, and in general we
> try to do it on xen-devel. Overall I think we are mostly succeeding even
> though admittedly the traffic is lower than qemu-devel.
> Maybe we just need more maintainers?

Yes, we do.  But as Paul Brook likes to say, in order to be a maintainer, you 
have to be willing to say no, not just apply patches.

It's not a question of maintainers, it's a question of people providing critical 
review of patches.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

>