Re: Bottleneck problem to merge Python patches

[Philippe Mathieu-Daudé]

Hi Aleksandar,

(extending the Cc list to broader audience)

On 9/18/20 10:33 PM, Aleksandar Markovic wrote:
> 
> On Friday, August 28, 2020, Ahmed Karaman <ahmedkhaledkaraman@gmail.com
> <mailto:ahmedkhaledkaraman@gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     - Apply pylint and flake8 formatting rules to the script.
>     - Use 'tempfile' instead of '/tmp' for creating temporary files.
> 
>     ---
> 
> Hello, folks.
> 
> This series seems forgotten. Can some of you perhaps take a look,
> review, and possibly integrate some patches in a pull request?
> 
> Ahmed invested quite of time to improve the functionality and quality of
> scripts, and they are truly useful for developers interested in
> performance measurement.

The Python patches are indeed being merged slowly, but are not
forgotten :) Eduardo sent just a pull request *yesterday* for
patches he had queued *before* QEMU 5.1, that is more than 1 year
ago!
https://www.mail-archive.com/qemu-devel@nongnu.org/msg742228.html

I hope he will be able to process the other Python patches sent
the last 12 months. He raised the problem few month ago saying he
was overwhelmed and was looking for help from the community.
Cleber helped a pair of times, I helped once, but then nobody
popped up volunteering.

I agree this is a community problem, nobody wants to become the
de-facto Python maintainer. Current maintainers are already busy
solving problem with low-level languages such C.
As a project, QEMU is evolving, using more and more Python, switched
to Meson, we might have Rust code too. Learning that for current
maintainers takes time. I guess we lack new contributors/maintainers
with interest in Python & QEMU.

This is my simple/rough analysis, as John had the same problem
2/3 months ago, his patches were on the list unreviewed for various
weeks. Same problem with Avocado patches, Lukas sent a series a bit
before Ahmed and it is still unreviewed:
https://www.mail-archive.com/qemu-devel@nongnu.org/msg737272.html

Alex Bennée recently said:

 "review time is the currency of qemu-devel ;-)"

We might be failing at explaining new contributors the importance
of peer-review, as this helps a lot maintainers. It is described
in the wiki but maybe new contributors don't read it, we don't
remember them to:
https://wiki.qemu.org/Contribute/SubmitAPatch#Participating_in_Code_Review
and:
https://wiki.qemu.org/Contribute/SubmitAPatch#Return_the_favor

My 2 cents...

Regards,

Phil.

> 
> Thanks,
> Aleksandar