Re: [Qemu-devel] An organizational suggestion

[Ian Jackson]

Jamie Lokier writes ("Re: [Qemu-devel] An organizational suggestion"):
> Ian Jackson wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Perhaps they are simply too busy or doing other things.

Indeed so.

> Perhaps it's simply not enough people are paid to do this and
> volunteers have other interests.  From what I've seen elsewhere, patch
> tracking doesn't help much if there's nobody actively working on
> integration and setting overall vision/direction.

Well, I'm certainly willing.  Perhaps I haven't made my availability
clear enough.

> Fabrice has indicated that there's room for a new maintainer (or
> presumably more than one, if they cooperate).  It'll be interesting to
> see if anyone steps forward, and if they can agree with Fabrice on
> direction for the project.  If there are any companies out there
> commercially dependent on QEMU and it's sister projects (KVM, Xen),
> consider hiring for it.

Xen (the whole ecosystem) is indeed very dependent on Qemu and the
divergence between our tree and the upstream one is far too great.
Many of our changes are entirely applicable to upstream.

I was hired by Xensource (now Citrix) specifically to work on the open
source Xen project.  I think one of the biggest tasks for that project
is trying to make some kind of sanity in our relationship (both code
and people) with Qemu upstream.  So we (specifically, I) have effort
available to help Qemu in general if this means that I can spend less
time trying to reconcile incompatible changes to our different
codebases.

Ian.