Re: [Qemu-devel] RFC RFC

[Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>]

On 18 February 2015 at 17:10, Vladimir Sementsov-Ogievskiy
<vsementsov@parallels.com> wrote:
> Can anybody explain what the reasons, politics and consequences of adding
> RFC into patch header in this mailing list? I think, it is not worth to add
> this information to http://wiki.qemu.org/Contribute/SubmitAPatch

"RFC" means "Request For Comments" and is a statement that you don't
intend for your patchset to be applied to master, but would like some
review on it anyway. Reasons for doing this include:
 * the patch depends on some pending kernel changes which haven't
   yet been accepted, so the QEMU patch series is blocked until that
   dependency has been dealt with, but is worth reviewing anyway
 * the patch set is not finished yet (perhaps it doesn't cover all
   use cases or work with all targets) but you want early review of
   a major API change or design structure before continuing

In general, since it's asking other people to do review work
on a patchset that the submitter themselves is saying shouldn't
be applied, it's best to:
 * use it sparingly
 * in the cover letter, be clear about why a patch is an RFC,
   what areas of the patchset you're looking for review on,
   and why reviewers should care

-- PMM