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

[Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>]

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.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

>
> As a whole it takes biblical times to get through the QEMU review
> process. I wonder how any commercial company with deadlines would be able
> to cope with them. Even the Xen Community, that is far from a commercial
> company, is having difficulties with them and now upstream QEMU is at
> risk of missing the 4.2 release target.
>
>
> We need more people reviewing patches. And we need more maintainers.
>
>
> Anthony Liguori is still the maintainer for many areas within QEMU, and
> he is clearly too busy for that. We need more people helping him review
> patches for source files like savevm.c and vl.c.
>
> I believe in leading by example, so Anthony Perard and I will try to
> review more patch series, even outside Xen support in QEMU, starting
> from now.
> I hope more people will start to do the same to the point that it will
> get natural to add more names and email addresses to the MAINTAINERS
> file.
>
> I hope that other people will recognize that this is a problem and be
> willing to step up to find a solution.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Stefano