On Mon, 12 Mar 2012, Anthony Liguori wrote:
"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.
Note that MAINTAINERS lacks an entry for savevm.c. That should imply M: Orphan.
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?
It's more complicated than that in a large project. MAINTAINERS has different
support levels. I think what you're proposing is M: Supported.
M: Odd fixes (which is what I proposed savevm.c as) is less rigorous than that.
OK, so the actual problem seems to be that not all the source files that
are supposed to be Supported are actually supported.
And of course some key files, like savevm.c are not even Maintained!!
For example if I am not mistaken we are missing an entry for vga/cirrus,
so that would also be Orphan, correct?