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

[Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>]

On 03/12/2012 02:21 PM, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
> On Mon, 12 Mar 2012, Anthony Liguori wrote:
>>>>> "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.
>
> OK, so the actual problem seems to be that not all the source files that
> are supposed to be Supported are actually supported.
> And of course some key files, like savevm.c are not even Maintained!!
> For example if I am not mistaken we are missing an entry for vga/cirrus,
> so that would also be Orphan, correct?

More likely Odd Fixes.  I think most of the things not listed are Odd Fixes 
which for something like cirrus is fine.  I doubt it's ever going to see a big 
invasive change as the code hasn't changed fundamentally in years.

But I agree, migration is an area that we need a proper maintainer for and 
hopefully this thread will help make that happen.

Regards,

Anthony Liguroi

>
> The situation is actually worse than I thought!
>