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

[Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>]

On 03/12/2012 02:10 PM, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
> On Mon, 12 Mar 2012, Anthony Liguori wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Right, but if one's name is right below a particular subsystem in the
> MAINTAINERS file, one should be the one in charge of providing a timely
> review to all the patches that touch that subsystem.

Note that MAINTAINERS lacks an entry for savevm.c.  That should imply M: Orphan.

>
> If you one is a maintainer and one is silently ignoring a patch touching
> one's subsystem, then one is not doing a good job as a maintainer.
> Of course if one is a maintainer and rather than giving useful feedback,
> limits the reply to a statement like "No", is also not doing a very good
> job.
> Do we all agree on these basic principles?

It's more complicated than that in a large project.  MAINTAINERS has different 
support levels.  I think what you're proposing is M: Supported.

M: Odd fixes (which is what I proposed savevm.c as) is less rigorous than that.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

>
> If it is not the case, and you don't think this is the role of a QEMU
> maintainer, then maybe we need to invent a new name for a new role that
> covers that function.