On 03/12/2012 12:34 PM, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
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?
Yes, we do. But as Paul Brook likes to say, in order to be a maintainer, you
have to be willing to say no, not just apply patches.
It's not a question of maintainers, it's a question of people providing critical
review of patches.