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

[Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>]

On 03/12/2012 03:12 PM, Stefan Weil wrote:
> Am 12.03.2012 18:06, schrieb Stefano Stabellini:
>> 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.
>>
>> 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
>
> I agree that more maintainers would be good, but we also need
> more people with commit rights.

I disagree strongly.  Having multiple pushers makes things difficult and 
encourages people to push without testing.  Part of what makes pushing take 
longer than it should today is that my test cycle takes at least 1-2 hours and 
it's not uncommon to have to go through 3-4 cycles of rebasing before being able 
to push.

> Why? There a many examples of
> urgent patches (= patches which fix broken builds) which take
> several days even when they were reviewed before they finally
> are committed.

Can you be specific?  I think you really mean, "urgent patches for Win32" but 
since you're the win32 maintainer, it's on you to do a PULL request.

> We also need more resources for technical maintenance of the
> QEMU infrastructure. For example, the official mirror of the
> QEMU git repository (https://github.com/qemu/QEMU) is several
> months behind, http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/qemu.git is
> even older.

Savannah is a dead tree.  I should just remove it.

Re: github, this hasn't seemed that urgent to me.

> It should be possible to have three mirrors which
> are nearly up to date (like http://repo.or.cz/w/qemu.git/).
>
> Only two maintainers are allowed to make full use of the patchwork
> (http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/project/qemu-devel/) infrastructure.
> Why not all maintainers?
>
> Maybe every maintainer can maintain a short summary of
> what he maintains, how (s)he does it (repository, expected
> response time, ...) in the QEMU wiki. I just added
> http://wiki.qemu.org/Contribute/StartHere#Maintainers
> and improved my own wiki page ("leading by example :-)").
>
> Thanks + regards
>
> Stefan W.
>
>