Hi,
This year's QEMU summit was held on October 21st, during KVM Forum in
Edinburgh, Scotland.
I volunteered to take the meeting's minutes, which you'll find below. But
it was harder than I expected to do it, so please allow for corrections
from other people who joined the meeting.
o Attendees:
- Anthony Liguori
- Kevin Wolf
- Luiz Capitulino
- Michael S. Tsirkin
- Michael Roth
- Peter Maydell
- Gerd Hoffmann
- Max Filippov
- Alex Graf
- Stefano Stabellini
- Andreas Färber
- Paolo Bonzini
- Stefan Hajnoczi
- Juan Quintela
o Software Freedom Conservancy
- QEMU is considering to become a project member
- To help with legal questions
- Financial account (to accept donations and payments for GSoC)
- Interest in funding OPW interns in the future
- Need to document a project organization structure
- Have to appoint a board (4 - 8 peoples)
* Anthony needs to clarify what obligations come with board participation
- In order for individuals to obtain approval from their employers
* Conservancy does not "own" QEMU in the sense that it owns any
copyright to the project. It effectively manages the project
- Are there alternatives?
* Anthony looked at it: it's a different kind of non-profit
- Action items: Anthony will fill the application and try to get
it submitted in November
o State of maintainership
- QEMU keeps growing
* adding more people and existing people are writting more code
* How can we fix patch merging, and patch quality?
- Some areas are not cared, because they are not people's personal interest
- Michael T.: Discuss on the list & fix the MAINTAINERS file
- Some people with commit access disappeared from the project
- Anthony was busy moving
- Anybody can review or setup a tree
- Paolo: people should send their own pull requests?
* Get reviewed-bys and send pull requests
* Random people shouldn't send pull requests, better to get Reviewed-bys
- Anthony: Require patches to have at least one Reviewed-by
* Should submaintainers add Reviewed-by in addition to Signed-off-by?
- No native git-am / git-commit support
* Andreas: When people step up as maintainer of not actively
maintained area, unlikely to get Reviewed-bys from others!
(e.g., CPU refactorings by Andreas with him as maintainer)
* Andreas: Sometimes just informal "looks OK" rather than Reviewed-by
- Shall be recorded as Acked-by, not as Reviewed-by
- Signed pull requests
* Will start with 1.7
* Required by 2.1?
o Testing
- Does buildbot still work?
* It's in a bad state right now, just doesn't work
* Our infrastructure doesn't work
* Stefan: there's another better tool for it: Travis
- It has some limitations (?)
* Stefan: we need someone to pursue and maintain this
* Should have: distributed, people could contribute their hardware,
have the results on qemu.org
* Anthony will push on maintainers to have automated testing
- May refuse pull requests w/o automated tests
- Andreas: Basic qtest coverage of machines prepared
* Discuss remaining problems in Hackathon?
* Call for maintainers to add at least trivial qtests for existing
non-default devices to assure they don't break
o Google Summer of Code
- Did it work? Can we improve it?
- Stefan: I don't get feedback from the community
* If projects are not merged, qemu doesn't benefit
* Communication with some students had problems (need to improve)
* Two students became qemu developers
* Students who failed was because they didn't have the requeriments
* Juan: information on wikipage has to be clearer on the project's
requeriments
* Peter: warn students they may fail before they do
* Alex: get patches posted upstream sooner
* Paolo: remember to be tactful when failing students
* This year we donated mentor's stipends to the Tor project
o The tone on the ML, is it getting bad?
- Paolo thinks it's the increased amount of emails
- Some projects have formal code of conduct
* This can be overkill for us
- Stefano: we need good examples
* need to have everyone doing it
- How can we improve it?
- Need someone to mediate when there's a problem
o Should we have a merge window dev style?
- Alex: doesn't change anything
- Paolo: benefit: can free Anthony during stablization period
- Juan: external people can help testing
- Merging several trees at the same time can generate problems
- Anthony: we'll extend release cycle, people hate it
- We may get there eventually
- We have cleanup to do in our process before making changes
* Increase hard freeze period (3 or 4 weeks?)
o Andreas: who should be the responsbility to propose to -stable? Maintainers
or author?
- General opnion: both
- Alex: Greg has scripts to collect patches for -stable
- Stefano: we should clear policy on older version releases
< FIXME: Anthony explained it, but Luiz couldn't pay attention & write
at the same time. Ask Anthony to write on the wiki >
- People can vonlunteer to maintan older trees if they want
* Only makes sense if you have an investiment (eg a distro)
o Andreas: Inconsistent prefixes in commit messages lately
(e.g., target-i386 vs. x86, s390/... vs. s390x, hw/... or not)
- Consistent prefix scheme desired for working with commit history
(as opposed to submaintainers' individual mail filtering processes)
* Can be sanitized by submaintainers as desired (no consensus)
