Re: [Qemu-devel] An organizational suggestion

[Ian Jackson]

Balazs Attila-Mihaly \(Cd-MaN\) writes ("[Qemu-devel] An organizational 
suggestion"):
> Since I've been subscribed to the list (a year or so), people have
> complained several times that patches did not get committed and they
> didn't know why.

Of course in a Free Software project people tend to do the work that
they enjoy, and there's a risk that by cricising maintainers for not
taking patches we'll just make the work of dealing with patches less
enjoyable.

Since the current committers evidently don't have reviewing and
committing these patches as a high priority, I think a better approach
would be for the current team to ask for volunteers to help out with
that task, and then from the responses (of which I think there will
probably be enough) select one or two appropriate people as new
committers with the specific responsibility for reviewing, committing
and if necessary reworking patches.

>   PostgreSQL (an open source database) currently uses
> a development process which I think the Qemu community could adopt
> and which could resolve these issues: every month they hold a
> so-called "commit-fest" when they, for a week, only work on
> committing patches. Now the exact time intervals are not important
> (it can be every three months a two week period for example),
> however in my opininion this would give a clear time-frame regarding
> the patches.

I'm not sure that the Qemu project generally appreciates this kind of
very formally structured approach.  I'm sure it works fine for
PostgreSQL.

> Of course if there is interest in adopting this kind of approach,
> some mechanism would be needed to manage the patch-queue (the
> patches which have not been committed yet) and I think that a closed
> Wiki [...]

You're suggesting using a wiki as a patch tracking system.  I think an
issue tracker, with a rule to only submit patches and not just bug
reports or feature requests, would probably be much less pain.

Ian.