Re: [Qemu-devel] An organizational suggestion

[Balazs Attila-Mihaly \(Cd-MaN\)]

> Of course in a Free Software project people tend to do the work that
> they enjoy, and there's a risk that by cricising maintainers for not
> taking patches we'll just make the work of dealing with patches less
> enjoyable.

Let me be very clear: I really, really appreciate the work the comitters are 
doing and know that balancing a job, family and contributing to open source 
projects is very difficult. I'm not trying to say that they should do even more.

> Since the current committers evidently don't have reviewing and
> committing these patches as a high priority, I think a better approach
> would be for the current team to ask for volunteers to help out with
> that task, and then from the responses (of which I think there will
> probably be enough) select one or two appropriate people as new
> committers with the specific responsibility for reviewing, committing
> and if necessary reworking patches.

Great idea. However (imho) this means that some kind of description should be 
put together about the "accepted coding standard". I imagine that at the 
beginning this could be something very minimalistic (like "follow the 
identation style from the source you are modifying") and could evolve over time 
to include more complex issues (like what functions / headers you should / 
shouldn't use to have cross platform compilability, etc)

>   I'm not sure that the Qemu project generally appreciates this kind of
>   very formally structured approach.  I'm sure it works fine for
>   PostgreSQL.

I don't know it either, but hopefully we'll get some feedback. 

>   You're suggesting using a wiki as a patch tracking system.  I think an
>   issue tracker, with a rule to only submit patches and not just bug
>   reports or feature requests, would probably be much less pain.

Yes, an issue tracker would be great, however a wiki is more versatile (it 
could contain for example the "accepted coding standard" document I was talking 
about earlier).

I'm interested in peoples opinion about this matter. As mentioned earlier I 
would be glad to assis with setting up a wiki / issue tracker. An other thing I 
thought about doing (and would like to see if there is interest) is an 
automated testing infrastructure for Qemu (which takes checkins from SVN and 
does different tests with it, like compiling with different compilers, 
performance tests, etc) since it seems to me that regression testing is an 
other no-so-strong point of Qemu.

Best regards.



      __________________________________________________________
Sent from Yahoo! Mail.
A Smarter Email http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html