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

[Stefano Stabellini]

On Mon, 12 Mar 2012, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> On 03/12/2012 12:06 PM, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> In all fairness, QEMU continues to grow year-to-year both in terms of total 
> commits and number of contributors.
> 
> The area that we struggle with is infrequent contributors that contribute 
> non-trivial things and are write-only contributors.
> 
> In this case, I really think the problem is expecting to be a write-only 
> contributor.  Part of participating in a community is not only pushing your 
> own 
> patches for acceptance but also reviewing other people's patches and 
> participating in the discussion.  If everyone only sends patches and doesn't 
> review patches, then we'll never make progress.
> 
> So I'd strongly suggest trying to spend some time reviewing other people's 
> work. 
>   Right now, there are at least four different efforts around migration yet I 
> don't see any of the people reviewing the other efforts.  I think this is 
> really 
> the main problem.

Point taken.
However maintainers should also be responsible of reviewing patches of
"infrequent write-only contributors".

I certainly do it for the areas I am a maintainer of, and in general we
try to do it on xen-devel. Overall I think we are mostly succeeding even
though admittedly the traffic is lower than qemu-devel.
Maybe we just need more maintainers?