[Qemu-devel] We need more reviewers/maintainers!!

[Stefano Stabellini]

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.

As a whole it takes biblical times to get through the QEMU review
process. I wonder how any commercial company with deadlines would be able
to cope with them. Even the Xen Community, that is far from a commercial
company, is having difficulties with them and now upstream QEMU is at
risk of missing the 4.2 release target.


We need more people reviewing patches. And we need more maintainers.


Anthony Liguori is still the maintainer for many areas within QEMU, and
he is clearly too busy for that. We need more people helping him review
patches for source files like savevm.c and vl.c.

I believe in leading by example, so Anthony Perard and I will try to
review more patch series, even outside Xen support in QEMU, starting
from now.
I hope more people will start to do the same to the point that it will
get natural to add more names and email addresses to the MAINTAINERS
file.

I hope that other people will recognize that this is a problem and be
willing to step up to find a solution.

Thanks,

Stefano