Re: [Qemu-devel] Unmaintained QEMU builds

[Andreas Färber]

Am 05.09.2010 um 17:57 schrieb Anthony Liguori:

> On 09/05/2010 10:10 AM, Avi Kivity wrote:
> > > As a baby step, is there any chance of publishing an automatic  
> > > nightly Windows (cross-)build as a .zip file on qemu.org? That  
> > > might give more users a chance of detecting runtime faults during  
> > > the development cycle.
> >
> > That's doable and useful, yes.
>
> I doubt it's useful.
>
> [...] We don't have myriads of users demanding better Windows  
> support.  Search the list, there's almost no one asking questions  
> about Windows [...]

Right. There's some more recent posts on that QEMU forum, although  
buried beneath a pile of spam.

Anyway, it's a chicken-and-egg problem. There's not much Win32 (nor  
Win64) contributions, there's a guesstimated minor number of users.  
Many of us including myself don't really care about the platform. When  
some Windows user does show up and reports an error against QEMU  
Manager v7.0, we have no clue what QEMU exactly that is based on, how  
it was compiled and whether there may be downstream patches involved,  
so we're not of much help. Nobody that I remember ever came up with  
git-bisect results to pinpoint where/how their regression was  
introduced.

There's three ways out:

1) We drop Windows support. No Windows user has so far participated in  
the discussion. When they cry, it'll be too late, cf. kqemu.

2) They make a step towards us.
* Posting questions, thankyous, patches here (and not just about the  
forum being down, like right now;), showing their existence and interest
* Basing patches on Git master and not some oldish release tarball
* Separating unrelated changes and explaining why changes were necessary
* Expecting and responding to review feedback
* ...

3) We make a step towards them. Some trivial step might (or might not)  
raise QEMU's attractiveness and get us one or another mid-term  
contribution.
* Build && publish Win32 binaries with a cron job
* Suggest a Win32 GSoC project?
* Move some of the nice feature documentation from the Contribute Wiki  
section to the About section for better visibility
* Publish a roadmap with estimated release dates to aid downstreams,  
improve downstream/upstream communication beyond KVM
* Add more guiding Wiki contents or link & update/extend MAINTAINERS  
file: define the defacto processes (rebase against Git tree URL, cc  
<email>, link to git-format-patch/git-send-email man page) and add  
info on missing subsystems/files (e.g. linux-user, Cocoa, SDL, VNC,  
the various TCG targets) and update maintainers (many Fabrices and  
question marks)
* Spawn topic lists to reduce qemu-devel traffic? (bugs? block? sparc?)
* Embrace feature contributions of sub-perfect quality? (i.e., picking  
good stuff from bad patches - thinking of an Austrian WLAN+Win32  
patch, an Italian ppcemb patch w/debug leftovers, the Haiku/x86 host  
patch (will ping him again), ...)
* ...

Most of the latter thoughts turn out not to be Windows-specific at all.

Regards,
Andreas