Re: [PULL 00/18] riscv-to-apply queue

[Alistair Francis]

On Wed, Aug 26, 2020 at 3:06 AM Bin Meng <bmeng.cn@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Peter,
>
> On Wed, Aug 26, 2020 at 5:25 PM Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org> 
> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, 26 Aug 2020 at 04:21, Bin Meng <bmeng.cn@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Wed, Aug 26, 2020 at 6:41 AM Alistair Francis <alistair23@gmail.com> 
> > > wrote:
> > > > Richard and Philippe review patches and some of the RISC-V patches get
> > > > reviewed by the RISC-V community. The main problem (which is a common
> > > > problem in open source) is that large technical patch series just get
> > > > ignored.
> > >
> > > Yep, I am only comfortable reviewing patches which I have confidence
> > > in. Right now I am not working on any H- or V - extension for RISC-V
> > > so I cannot contribute to any review of these large numbers of H- or
> > > V- extension related patches. Sorry!
> >
> > So, everybody has a ton of work they need to do and only a limited
> > amount of time they might have for code review, so it's important to
> > prioritise. But I would encourage you, and other people contributing
> > to RISC-V parts of QEMU, to at least sometimes review changes that are
> > a little bit out of your "comfort zone" if nobody else seems to be
> > doing so. Review can find bugs, areas that are confusing or need
> > comments, etc, even without a thorough knowledge of the relevant spec.
> > (In fact, not knowing the spec can help in identifying where
> > explanatory comments can help the reader!) And for the project it means
> > we have more people who at least have some idea of what that bit of code
> > is doing. Review that is limited to "this code seems to make sense but
> > I haven't checked it against the spec" is better than patches getting
> > no review at all, I think. And it's a good way to build your knowledge
> > of the codebase and the architecture over time.
>
> Agree. I really wanted to spend more time on this project but like you
> said it's priorities.
>
> One thing I do not understand is that according to MAINTAINTERS there
> are 4 custodians for the RISC-V maintenance work but it looks to me so
> far only Alistair is actively reviewing patches. I know Palmer used to
> review patches but if it's only one person that might be some issues.
> At least MAINTAINTERS can cross-review, and we have 4 there.

Yeah, most of the people in the RISC-V MAINTAINERS file are inactive.
Besides Palmer and myself I haven't seen an email from anyone.

Alistair


>
> Regards,
> Bin