[Qemu-devel] QEMU Summit 2016 minutes

[Peter Maydell]

Hi all; these are the minutes from the QEMU Summit 2016,
which was the usual informal gathering of submaintainers
at KVM Forum this year. As usual, none of this is set-in-stone
decisions; further input and discussion on-list is welcome.


 * release process
  + I'm away November, which will be in the middle of softfreeze:
Stefan H kindly agreed to do the merge-pullrequests work for this
  + seemed to be a feeling that our freeze process is too long (and
perhaps that our releases are too infrequent)
  + plan for 2.8: that we set a date for "pull requests on the list"
which will be 1 week before rc0, and have only
    2 weeks of soft freeze (with rc0 being definitely on time)
  + be stricter with not allowing features in softfreeze
  + there were some proponents of much more frequent releases (eg
monthly); personally I'm not sure we could really do these in our
current state
 * QEMU server
  + Jeff Cody is now our sysadmin, and is working on switching
us to new hardware
  + usual remarks about whether we could use github or some other
managed hosted service instead -- this is worth investigating in
the longer term but we should concentrate on fixing what we have first
 * code quality and similar
  + MAINTAINERS file still doesn't cover everything: make checkpatch
complain about new non-covered files; add entries to cover everything
currently in the tree
  + strong support for more aggressive deprecation and removal of old
and unmaintained code (eg warning users about unmaintained boards that
will be removed in future releases, marking functions as deprecated so
they don't get used in new code)
 * qemu-trivial
  + the original idea here was that several people would all work in a
rota on collecting and forwarding trivial patches
  + in practice just Michael Tokarev has been doing this work, and it
tends to happen in bursts some time apart; he has agreed that he
would appreciate some help here
  + having several extra people here might help, and also make it easier
for people with less QEMU experience to assist (they can collate the
obvious cases into trivial and ask the other -trivial maintainers for
advice in complex cases)
  + a couple of volunteers for helping with qemu-trivial were suggested
    (and will be approached on the subject)
 * making it easier for new contributors to get started
  + more active community management?
  + blog posts and aggregation (eg a kvm.planet aggregator)
  + better curation of our wiki, which has some very outdated bits
which leave doubt about the reliability of the rest
  + we have a lot of bad old code still, which is confusing to people
who try to use it as a model for writing their new device model, etc
    (more aggressive deprecation should help here)
  + Amit to set up a wiki page as a framewark for "how do I write a
block layer backend/new device model/new board/etc", initially
    populated with links to various past KVM Forum presentations
  + provide skeleton/examples for drivers, block backends etc?
  + we could do better documentation of our internals (though out of
date info is always a problem)
  + qemu-tech.texi claims to be internals docs but it is horrifically
out of date; we should move
    the still-relevant information into code comments or similar and delete it
  + our website, IRC, etc are very old-school

thanks
-- PMM