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

[Stefano Stabellini]

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.