On Mon, 12 Mar 2012, Anthony Liguori wrote: > 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.
Right, but if one's name is right below a particular subsystem in the MAINTAINERS file, one should be the one in charge of providing a timely review to all the patches that touch that subsystem. If you one is a maintainer and one is silently ignoring a patch touching one's subsystem, then one is not doing a good job as a maintainer. Of course if one is a maintainer and rather than giving useful feedback, limits the reply to a statement like "No", is also not doing a very good job. Do we all agree on these basic principles? If it is not the case, and you don't think this is the role of a QEMU maintainer, then maybe we need to invent a new name for a new role that covers that function.
