On 16 April 2012 17:03, Andreas Färber <afaer...@suse.de> wrote: > Am 16.04.2012 18:00, schrieb Anthony Liguori: >> On 04/16/2012 09:31 AM, Andreas Färber wrote: >>> Hello, >>> >>> Sparked by conversations with Anthony and the discussion on a recent >>> KVM call, >>> I've started overhauling our MAINTAINERS file. >>> >>> Patches 1-5 fix syntax issues. >>> >>> Patch 6 documents our orphaned stable trees, as requested by Anthony. >>> >>> Patch 7 drops the orphaned and by now completely busted darwin-user >>> emulation. >>> >>> Apparently we have unwritten eligibility criteria for new maintainers >>> in terms >>> of qemu-devel participation and patch handling quality, but no formal >>> mechanism >>> to handle replacing lost maintainers. >>> >>> The current practice has become for Anthony to expect people listed in a >>> MAINTAINERS section with S: Maintained to handle patches in that area >>> themselves >>> and to supply a [PULL] request to get those changes into qemu.git. >>> This has the downside that patches falling into an area, where a >>> maintainer >>> is listed but not responding, simply bitrot on the list. >> >> I think we ought to aggressively downgrade subsystems if this is really >> a problem. Unfortunately, it's hard to judge whether this is a problem >> until someone complains about a specific subsystem. >> >>> Patches 8-11 therefore propose to upgrade some actively maintained >>> sections >>> to Maintained to formalize the Maintained vs. Odd Fixes semantics: >> >>> Maintained means PULLs from maintainer expected. >> >> Yes. More specifically, if something is Maintained, I would expect the >> patch to always come in through that specific tree. >> >>> Odd Fixes means Reviewed-by/Acked-by or committer's gut feeling is >>> sufficient. >> >> Yes. Odd Fixes and below means the patch is "fair game" but that the >> listed M: probably ought to at least be consulted. > > The current status descriptions seem to be a copy from Linux. Could you > address Kevin's comment by proposing a change to the descriptions in our > copy?
Here's my stab at it: Supported: Someone is actually paid to look after this. This is the same as Maintained (see below) but you might have a greater chance of faster response times. Maintained: Someone actually looks after it. The maintainer will have a git subtree for this area and patches are expected to go through it. Bug reports will generally be investigated. Odd Fixes: It has a maintainer but they don't have time to do much other than throw the odd patch in. Patches are applied directly to master; there is no subtree, and no requirement for an Ack from the maintainer for a patch to be applied. Bug reports without reasonable quality patches attached are likely to go unfixed. Orphan: No current maintainer. Send patches to qemu-devel; persistence may be required to get something reviewed and committed, especially if it's a large change. Obsolete: Old code. Something tagged obsolete generally means it has been replaced by a better system and you should be using that. (I dropped the parenthetical about becoming a maintainer of an orphan area; if we want to keep that I think an expanded section about how to demonstrate that you might be capable of the job, how/when to add sections for new code/drivers/boards, etc would be more useful.) -- PMM